HotelChatter

Kerry Dougherty, a columnist for the Virginian-Pilot, had some harsh words for the key cards.

Many times, when walking the corridor of my hotel, I see frustrated guests locked out of their rooms and cussing their keys.

Wooden keys are stubborn. They splinter. They break. And they don't hold a magnetic charge.

"If it doesn't work, don't worry, we'll get you another one," the desk clerk assured me Saturday night as he handed me my wooden key, adding, "Be careful. They're pretty fragile."

Fragility. Just what you want in a hotel key.

Over at Envirowonk, a political blog about green issues, Marsha encountered a clerk at the Sheraton who was giving out the real scoop on the key cards.

"They're wood, but they don't work too well in our doors," she said a bit sheepishly, handing me the usual slick credit card plastic set. "So here are your other keys." Valiant effort at replacing the plastic room keys, I said. Too bad it didn't work.

The City Pages blog also had some major frustration getting into their hotel room.

I've entered my room using this keycard roughly eight times. Most tries before a successful door opening? Nine. Least tries? One. Which happened once. Then I bought a lottery ticket. If I don't win, I'm going to use the ticket to try to open the door to my hotel.

And lastly, the Washington Post chronicled several reports of people unable to open doors with the wooden key cards.

"They didn't work," said lawyer Stephen Skinner, an elected Barack Obama delegate from West Virginia. "At all." Skinner got one of the balsalike cards as he checked into the downtown Magnolia Hotel and had to slog back to the lobby for a traditional plastic key....

And our colleague Alec MacGillis ran into Ned Lamont, the Connecticut cable industry entrepreneur who used some of his own millions in an unsuccessful attempt to unseat Dem-now-indie Sen. Joe Lieberman, making his trek to the Marriott Tech Center front desk to get help with his little balsa key.

Now, we understand that the traditional plastic key cards have issues too. We have experienced more times than we like to count returning to our hotel room late at night only to find the key card has been de-magnetized by something in our purse thus forcing us to haul our butts down to the front desk to get a new card.

So the wooden key cards are the same way. Except with more "user error."

Have you tried the wooden key cards? Did they work or fail? Let us know in comments below.

[Photo: City Pages]