Elana and I are at our third stop on our “Jersey Shore Road Trip”. This time we are staying at a cute little boutique hotel just a block from the beach. The hotel was designed by Bob and Cortney Novogratz, owners of the NYC based design firm, Sixx Design, and stars of Bravo’s docu-series “9 by Design.”. It is a rather cool place that has some great design elements and some pretty neat tech built into it. The first that caught my eye was the key system that is used to access the elevator and open the room door. Before getting into it a little background.
The first hotel we stayed in was an old school resort that had, at one time, been a shore golf club. It still had that old world feel and only a few “new amenities” had been updated. Among them was the commonplace key system that uses a magnetized strip on a plastic card that, when slid into the slip in the door mechanism, unlocks it. Well at least that’s the theory. The reality was that no less than twice we had to go all the way back to the lobby because the key had become demagnetized and we couldn’t get into our room.
Annoying. 🙁
The next stop was the newest hotel and resort in Atlantic City. It was new, sharp and… used the same exact door mechanisim as stop one. And just to keep things consistent, we once again had two occasions when we couldn’t get into the room and had to go all the way downstairs (we were on the 27th floor) and key the keys remagnetized,
REALLY annoying. 🙁 🙁
Then came stop three. The keys look the same except that they don’t have the telltale black magnetic strip on them. To even get the elevator to let you access your floor you hold the card in front of the sensor. There’s no slot to put it in and no need for them to actually touch. Just hold the card in front of the sensor and you are good to go. The same holds true for the room lock. You hold the card in front of the sensor and within a second you can hear the locking mechanism opening.
It is a great use of technology that every hotel should consider moving to. Better still, with continued rumors that the next generation of smartphone will include some sort of Near Field Communication it is totally possible that with a year or two (ie during next summer’s visit here since we WILL be coming back) we won’t need a room key at all. We’ll simply hold up our smartphone and the door will magically open. (Well at least my phone will. Elana won’t let go of her BlackBerry and we all know how that is going these days.)