I’ve been doing a bit of travelling in Europe and Africa and have noticed that many of the nicer hotels have a device just inside the hotel-room door where you place your door key-card. Put the card in, and the main electricity goes on. Take it out and the electricity goes off. What’s the background on these?
I can see the advantage to the hotel… If you leave the room you need to take the key out of the slot (so you can get back in the room later) and voila, the hotel owners save on electricity since you don’t leave any lights on inside. Is that the main advantage? To me these readers are a big pain because:
[ul]
[li]I want to leave the power on for some things in the room. I like to keep my laptop running in the room and when the power goes off it turns to batteries and when the batteries run down it hibernates - I don’t want that to happen.[/li]
[li]I may want to charge something (a cell phone, a digital camera battery, whatever, and need power while the room is vacant. [/li]
[li]My wife might want to stay in the room and wants the power on, but I still want the key in case she’s taking a shower or sleeping when I return. Thus strictly because of this device we need one extra key.[/li][/ul]
I’ve learned that I can just put my driver’s license or some other card in the slot sometimes and trip the switch, but that would seem to defeat it’s purpose. Why have this type of switch at all - is it purely the electricity savings? Is it just a European/African thing? Why don’t American hotels have these, or do they? Basically what’s the story behind these things?
I’ve run into these in Japan, and came to the same conclusions as the OP. However, one advantage to this system is that you always know where to find your room key when it comes time to go out (I am critically absent minded and usually spend 10 minutes trying to find the friggin’ room key).
Surely not all the power goes out in the room. Otherwise you’d have to reset the digital clock near the bed every time you went back. And the mini-bar fridge would need to be kept powered.
You could just stick a double power adaptor in your laptop bag, and unplug one of the things that they DO leave on when you get there. It means your laptop will be near the fridge or on the bed while you are gone, but if you’re not there, it does not really matter where it is, does it?
I actually don’t recall a clock in any of the hotels that I’ve stayed at that have the master switch feature. That said, I’m sure there are hotels out there that do have dual circuits that aren’t connected to the master switch.
Interestingly enough I’m currently staying at a Grand Hyatt hotel in Cairo and it although it’s a five star hotel, it doesn’t have a clock (although it has a sophisticated wake-up call system). As an experiment I took the room key out of the slot and the mini-bar fridge did turn off. It doesn’t have any perishables, but it does have beverages and chocolates.
It’s to save money on the electricity savings and also so they can market themselves as using environmentally sound practices. American hotels don’t use it because
(1) Energy is much cheaper here
(2) Fewer people care about the environment
(3) Americans are more likely to feel entitled while Europeans are used to having to put up with this kind of crap from their service industry.
[slight hijack] Not only does the Grand Hyatt have a sophisticated wake-up call system, in each room is a pointer to Mecca. Been to the rotating bar/restaurant yet?[end hijack]
And I can attest that the keycard-master switch phenomenon is in South Asia as well (Malaysia,Thailand, Singapore, and Sri Lanka.)
Perhaps an additional reason is fire safety. Cutting the power off when a guest leaves the room prevents nasty incidents such as fires started by curling irons left plugged in.