Hotel Room Key Security By Jim Abrams, California Hotel & Lodging Association A PersON sTAyeD AT a california hotel and kept his metal room key when he checked out. When he returned five years later, that same key still opened the same door! The person used this access to the room to commit a significant burglary. This is a common scenario, and many cases involve rape or other physical injury in addition to property theft. Here’s the lesson from these stories: A system of key control is essential to the security of a lodging property. All keys— whether metal for conventional locks or plastic for electronic locks—should be adequately controlled. The best lock in the world can’t protect a property or its guests if poor key control allows a criminal to obtain a key to that lock.1 lodging establishments of all types and sizes—hotels, motels, bed and breakfast inns, resorts, spas, guest ranches, vacation home rentals, timeshares, and condos—need to remember that they owe their guests a duty of “reasonable care” to safeguard them and their property, and that one of the most critical elements of that duty is to prevent unauthorized entry into guest rooms. in other words, hotels and inns need to have strict policies in place for issuing, controlling, and otherwise dealing with guest room “keys,” including traditional key-in-knob locks, electronic key locks, locks operated by smart phones, and other new evolving mechanisms. While many hotels now use electronic room keys, others continue to use metal keys. The use of metal keys, when combined with a lack of proper key control measures, can result in finding that the lodging operator failed to exercise reasonable care (i.e., that the operator was negligent) and substantial financial liability for the hotel. For example: in King v. Trans-Sterling, Inc. supreme Court of Nevada, 103 Nev. 823; 809 P.2d 51; 1987 Nev. LEXIS 2572, June 22, 1987, unpublished opinion, the plaintiff charged that she had been attacked and raped in her room at the stardust hotel in las Vegas. The room showed no signs of forced entry and evidence showed that, although the hotel had lost as many as 500 keys a week, the rooms had not been re-keyed since the hotel opened twenty-five years earlier. No records had been kept that would indicate how many master keys had been lost or even which employees had keys to which rooms. The owners of the hotel were ordered to pay $750,000 in compensatory damages and $2.5 million in punitive damages.1 note that california and many other states do not permit punitive damages to be covered by insurance. 6 California Hotel & Lodging A Associatition summer 2015 Basic Key Control Recommendations here are some key control issues and recommendations from David Stipanuk’s book, Security and Loss Prevention Management1: • Are key records kept up-to-date by all departments controlling those records? • are keys issued to employees on a basis of need rather than convenience or status? • For hotels still using metal guest room keys, is there a standard policy for rotating all keys and locks at least once a year? • For hotels still using metal guest room keys, are locks replaced promptly when master and emergency keys are lost or found missing? • how many master keys are available, and to whom are they issued? Would a system of submaster keys that restricted employees to specific areas be helpful to your property? • When did you last spot check to ensure that officials or employees actually had keys that were issued to them? do your employees turn in their keys at the end of a shift? • are extra keys maintained securely? do you limit access to extra keys? 1. David M. Stipanuk and Raymond C. Ellis, Jr., Security and Loss Prevention Management, 3rd ed. (Lansing, MI: American Hotel & Lodging Association Educational Institute, 2013), 103.
CHLA Lodging News Summer 2015
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