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

I can actually answer this one, I did roomcard installation and training for hotels a good while back.

The swiped cards have a few different things built-in as part of the identity stripe they program into each card.

Every time your card is created, there’s a space in the magnetic band/RFID feedback that has:

* Your room number
* Duration of validity
* Is this a new assignment

When you first get your key, your key will have the option for ‘new assignment’ turned on. The moment it swipes into the lock, the lock sees the flag and goes ‘oh, this is my new master key now and it will be valid for ‘this long”. Each time a ‘new assignment’ key is swiped in, the old data gets over written in favor of the new key’s identity. This is how basic access control is done.

If the front desk needs to make a copy, they can make a copy without turning on the ‘new assignment’ flag.

Once the assignment expires, the keys are no longer valid and the lock will sit as-is until the next ‘new assignment’ is swiped.