That is just bad management. The whole point of the interior deadbolt lock in a hotel room door is so no one can accidentally walk in on you thinking it is an empty room.
An emergency keycard that can open a hotel room locked from the inside is only supposed to be kept at the front desk for use during an emergency, mostly by police or firefighters so they do not break down the door and cause tens of thousands of dollars of damage. And its presence and use should be constantly accounted for.
> cause tens of thousands of dollars of damage
The cops or firefighters are not going to spend time cutting, they are going to bust it open with a battering ram which will ruin everything, requiring reframing, new door, new thresholds, new frames, new locks ($2k), and maybe flooring too.
And then add in opportunity cost from not being able to rent the room during repair, which would take weeks due to those materials not being available at Home Depot.
I would budget at least $10k, and I bet it would not exceed $20k, but either way, using a battering ram on a hotel door is very costly.
I don't see the connection. The Mandalay Bay incident was an emergency, and the door was forced. What needed to change?
In any case, I would classify a guest refusing to open the door for a room check as outline in the rental agreement as an emergency (which should simply state once every x days or per management’s discretion).
It could be up to hotel management to go in without police, but I would certainly not give any line level employee an emergency key card to carry around at all times for that scenario. And I would also expect a manager to take on that task themselves.
They told me couldn't whistle and spin the crowbar nonchalantly before casually popping open doors that had a dead battery in front of the guest waiting to stay in that same hotel.
What were the improvements over "crowbar classic"?
If the reader had a decently secure channel to the central auth piece, then it shouldn't (in theory) matter how simple or complex the id would be. (?)
That’s very often not the case, though, especially in retrofitted installations.
Locks are sometimes offline and even battery powered (and I suspect they can even report a dying battery to the front desk by setting the appropriate flag on keycards as they’re being read).
None anymore! They're being phased out as we speak. They were supposed to be end of life last year, though they pushed back end of life EoY 2024, because the MTA is never on time, all the time.
The Metrocard is actually a quite elegant and resilient/decentralized system, given the technology that was available when it was introduced. OMNY depends on a network connection being (almost) always available.
There are two types of magnetic stripe cards available: High-coercivity (HiCo) and low-coercivity (LoCo). The field-rewritable kind used in hotels is usually LoCo, to make the writers smaller and cheaper. But that also makes the cards much more prone to accidental corruption by magnets you might have on you, like earbuds, magnetic wallets etc.
Bank cards are usually only ever programmed once (these days), i.e. when they're issued, so they're usually HiCo, making them much more robust against that. In addition to that, magnetic stripe usage has been phased out for payment cards in most countries and is getting rare even in the US, so for all you know, and depending on where you live/shop, your magnetic stripes might have already been demagnetized without any adverse effects!
Bonus trivia question: Guess which kind NYC MTA Metrocards are :)
Edit: Oh, I just saw that you asked about contactless keycards! For these I actually have no idea, and I haven't had one fail on me yet.
I just know that they often use a similar scheme ("works for rooms x, y, z, until timestamp n"), sometimes with a bit of cryptography on top (often with a single shared key across all instances of the same lock and even across hotels...) but using non-networked locks, so there can definitely be synchronization/propagation issues too.