Vegas is unique in that respect in as typically people are not in a hotel unless they are staying there. In Vegas they have the casinos which people wander in and out of, and without some form of verification, people off the street could just camp out at the swimming pools.
I lived there for 10ish years, basically 1985-95. Sneaking into at least some hotel pools used to be easy and good clean fun. Not anymore.
US hotels are very different from the rest of the world. In the US, you pay before you sleep. Every other place I’ve been, they quote you a rate at checkin, and tot up the bill when you leave. I’ve never been overcharged. I don’t worry about it, even if staying 5-10 days. Maybe it’s different in hotels that cater mainly to internationak travelers.
I just though of another example. I visited my girlfriend, now wife, at her college in 1973. She was in the band, so I wanted to go to the football game to see her play. It was free for students, and cost something for non-students. It turned out they were taking make up pictures for student’s who hadn’t gotten their ids yet, so I told them I was a freshman (I was in first year grad school) and they took my picture and gave me a temp id good for the game. No questions asked.
I wonder if anyone was confused about why this student vanished.
In hotels, did you used to be able to just walk up to the front desk and ask for the key for a certain room? I’m not sure I ever saw it in real life, but I remember seeing it in old movies. Someone would just walk up to the front desk and say “Room 221” and the clerk would turn around, take the key off the wall and hand it to the person without any kind of verification that the person was actually staying in the room.
I recall scenes like that. I assumed the clerk recognized the person. Maybe if you go back far enough it was that basic theme we’ve discussed, if the guy looks and sounds like he belongs there then someone will give him the key.
And hotel security was incredibly lax in days not even so old. Connie Francis won a $2.5 million judgement from Howard Johnson’s after she was raped in her room in 1974. This was a record amount of money that sent shockwaves through the hotel industry and led to the modern security methods seen now. They gave out keys with the room number on it back in those days, they weren’t changed with each guest, and many hotel rooms could be opened with master keys that could be obtained in a variety of ways.
I’ve stayed places in the last five years that gave physical keys with the room number on the little tag that also gives the address to mail the key back to if it’s found. Granted they weren’t hotels exactly, but outdated 70s style “resorts” in the Catskills - and they have 70s style security.
When I am Curious (Yellow) came out it was a Very Big Deal, being more or less the first X-rated movie. I’d just moved from California to Pennsylvania and, of course they were checking everybody’s ID at the box office. My California driver’s license with my photo, thumbprint, signature, and description was not good enough for the seller. I then said, “Here’s my draft card (remember those?). I’m not registering for the draft early just so I can see a goddam movie!” and he reluctantly sold me a ticket.
I was wondering what kind of magic ID Pennsylvania had but when it arrived in the mail, it was merely the stub end of an IBM card with a name, description, and a space to sign it.
Not really. In most of the US you have to provide a CC beforehand so they have something they can charge against if you skip. Your card isn’t touched except for maybe a small hold until you’ve stayed the night. I don’t normally stay more than a week anywhere, so I don’t know how far they’ll let the bill grow before tapping the CC. But I have run up some mid-4-figure bills without them touching my card.
There are certainly many booking websites where you pay first as a condition of getting the super cheapo rate. Including sites run by the major brands themselves. As well these super cheapo rates also include you accepting paying a penalty if you try to cancel later, change the dates, etc. Same sort of yield management program the airlines run. More convenience / flexibility for you costs more; less convenience / flexibility for you costs less.
I’m sure at the low end of hotels / motels (and not even just the hourly ones 
) there are plenty that demand cash (not cards) up front. I don’t have much experience with them, so can’t usefully comment.
There’s missing context on what you’re seeing there. Hotels (and most especially, low end para-hotel flophouses) would not allow keys to be brought outside the building in the past. During the times of physical metal keys, a key outside the building meant a potentially copied key, or a lost item that was cumbersome and expensive to replace. This was also a crude pre-computer tracking system; the location of the key could be used to note whether the room was unsold, occupied, or occupied by a guest who was out and available to be cleaned.
Everyone had to turn in their key to the front desk when they left the hotel and ask for it back when they returned. So, what you’re seeing is the clerk recognizing a guest who he already knows is staying at the hotel from a recent interaction and giving that person the key to the room he is staying in.
When was this? I remember being in hotels with my parents all the way back to the mid-60’s with metal keys and they never had to turn them in when we went out for the day. How common of a practice was this? We stayed in hotels (not motels) all over the country and this never happened.
Not that I’m saying it never happened. I’m just questioning how common it was. Quite recently I saw some kind of hotel rescue program where the owner insisted on it. The guests hated it and the show host went crazy trying to convince the owner that her policy was irritating and nuts.
There was a hijacking in Japan in the 00s because of a security hole. If you flew into Tokyo Haneda airport, you could retrieve your checked luggage then go back into the gate area without going through a security check again.
So the hijacker checked in a knife into a carry-on size luggage at another airport, retrieved his carry-on at Haneda then proceed to use it to hijack another flight.
The stupid thing was that the reason for the hijack was that the guy had noticed the security hole, wrote a letter to whoever and then expected a job from it. When he didn’t get the job, he got angry and actually then hijacked a plane. At least he didn’t need a job after that.
The best forged ID I saw was our university ID. I was working campus security at night and we had keys to pretty much all of campus, including the place where they made the IDs. My buddy made himself (and eventually me) faculty IDs, using the original paper, camera, embossing stamp, etc. This was obviously before it was computerized. I don’t think I ever had a chance to use it, so it was a stupid thing to do, but it goes to show that you have to have security measures to watch security. They guy also got access to computer labs by challenging people to reenter their codes while he watched. I guess most people didn’t figure out that the security guards shouldn’t know their codes, either.
It was quite common in Japan up until everyone got the electronic cards. I saw it in American hotels in the 90s when I was going over for trade show conventions.
Keys-at-the-front-desk began to be phased out for two reasons - the well-known lawsuit filed by Connie Francis against Howard Johnson caused a rethinking of security procedures beginning in 1974, and computerized systems became standard at most large hotels by the late 80s. As to why some hotels in the mid-60s might have used this system and others didn’t, I can’t say, though I can make a guess. Using TV and movies as a rough proxy for what to expect in real life, front desks holding keys seems pretty ubiquitous in the 40s and 50s at decent hotels and survived well into the 90s at crappy cash-only motels under bridges.
My guess is that the primary purpose of the keyholding system was not anything to do with security, but rather as an easy way of seeing which guests had gone out for the day when prioritizing room cleaning. At hotels catering more to business travelers or long-term guests, schedules are less predictable and you need to know the status of each room individually. At hotels mainly hosting families on vacation, you can reliably assume that most rooms will be empty during the main part of the day and it’s more efficient to just let the staff clean an adjacent block of rooms at a time and note the few that were occupied.
Some hotels in Europe still use this practice, presumably just to give an old-timey feel and provide more contact with human service.
Heh. I flew into that airport several times in the 1990s. You could even see people having dinner when you looked into their apartments as you flew past their highrise.
As for handing hotel keys to the front desk, this was a common practice in Thailand into recent times. They were often fastened to huge chunks of wood or plexiglass containing a sign not to take the key off-premises.
One final approach for Washington National used to get really close to the hotels in the Rosslyn neighborhood. We were in Key Bridge Marriot for a week or so in the summer of '79 and passenger jets were going right past our window!
Still do when landing to the south.
I though 9/11 prompted the FAA to move that approach more over the Potomac.
It’s been “follow the twisting river for noise abatement” since I was kid and Dad was flying it in 707s.
What has changed is now with the advent of GPS-based approaches we can do the same “follow the twisty river” bit in the clouds. Used to be that if the cloud bases were a little too low or the visibility was a bit too poor to visually follow the river the alternative approach was a straight in with a visual jug handle at the end that was more over the Pentagon & Rosslyn than over the river. While that approach still exists, it is very rarely used.