You Don’t Need to Use Your Room Key to Turn on the Lights in Your Hotel Room
At least half of the hotel rooms I’ve stayed in these days require you to insert your room key into the slot next to the door in order to do things like turn on lights or use outlets. This is a detail that I forget about at least once on my trip and end up spending a few minutes looking around trying to figure out why I can’t figure out how to turn on the bedside lamp.
This week , a game-changing tip went viral on Twitter : You don’t need to use your hotel key in this slot. In fact, you can put almost any card there as a replacement. For example, an old hotel key that you still had in your wallet or a local grocery store bonus card.
Truth be told, the little slot can be a clutch to keep track of your key while you’re in your room, but it’s nice to know you don’t have to use it.
This means that in theory you could insert a card and leave it on for the duration of your stay, or use a different card as a last resort if you want to go out for a while and leave something like charging your laptop or camera in the room while you do this. The trick has already been tested by several people on Twitter, but doesn’t work everywhere.
Another solution: ask for more room keys than you need to leave one in the card slot for the duration of your stay.