in hotels, if you lose your room key card, how are they able to reprogram the new one so it works and the old one doesn’t?

Question

Is there some system that transmits information to your door card reader on what the new key is, or is it something different entirely?

In: 1028

Answer 1

Working in the hotel business back in the 1980’s. We used a system called Ving. The way it was explained to us was that when a new key was presented to the lock, the new key also “described” what the next key would look like. When the next key came along it would be accepted by the lock and the new key would “describe” what the next key would look like and the lock would delete the old key so it wouldn’t work anymore. This negates the need for a lock to “remember” a list of future keys. The lock only has to keep track of two keys; the current one and the next one.