Some European hotels have a small device inside the front door that regulates electricity use in the room. You have to place your room key in that device in order to turn the electricity on. Sometimes you cannot run the air conditioning without your room key inserted. Though it might save the hotel a few bucks to keep the air conditioning turned off when you're out of your room, it's possible for a room to get so hot and steamy that it can't be cooled in time to get your eight hours of comfortable sleep.So this is the really useful tip: you can put any card in that slot.. It doesn't have to be a room key. The "card reader" is unsophisticated. It cannot read the magnetic strip. It can only tell that a card is in there. So ... you can use a key from your last hotel, or your Costco card, or perhaps even a piece of plastic with no magnetic strip at all.
It would be interesting to get some clarification on that last question!
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Virtuoso travel agent consultant travel+tip electricity device air+conditioning European hotel
3 comments:
We tried this in Italy. We had two room keys. My husband got to the hotel room first and while his key card was in the slot inside the room, my key would not work to open the door! Pretty interesting tactic on this hotel's part. They only give you one room key. I thought I had lost mine and asked for an additional one. It would be interesting to see if that is the same at other European hotels.
In India, in a US hotel chain, I recall that the AC system was the only thing that worked if you remove the card from its slot. But temperatures of India can't be compared to temperatures of Europe..
Thanks for this tip.
Really useful.
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