NEW YORK—Under siege by thieves who regularly got their hands on old-fashioned room keys, hotels in New York began using electronic locks on their doors in 1977, led by the fabled, fusty Algonquin.
The new keys would be plastic, with a magnetic strip swiped through a card reader on the door. They would leave an electronic trail, stamped with the times that a door opened, closed or was left ajar.
It is likely that this technology will provide an informative record of traffic in and out of the suite at the Sofitel Hotel where a 32-year-old housekeeper, a widowed immigrant and mother, encountered Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Since Strauss-Kahn’s arrest on charges of sexual assault, his allies have been busy inflating trial balloons.
Benjamin Brafman, a lawyer for Strauss-Kahn, declared that the evidence was “not consistent with forcible encounter”—inviting, inevitably, the suggestion that no force was evident because none was required.
Brafman thus walked up to the edge of the cliff but did not quite say there had been consensual sex.
As Strauss-Kahn surely knows from his far-flung travels, the hotels of the world are cleaned by immigrants, most of them women.
The women’s vulnerabilities are legion, and in many countries, hoteliers have adopted a raft of precautions to protect staffs and guests.
For example, if a male guest calls for service, the housekeeping department will send up a male attendant.
“Oftentimes, male guests will order the pay-per-view adult movies, and then call for towels, perhaps hoping that a woman will be sent to bring them up,” said Peter M. Krauss, chief sales and marketing officer for Plasticard Locktech International of Asheville, North Carolina, which provides card keys to hotels.
“So whenever they can, the hotels will send up a male if the call comes from a male guest,” Krauss explained.
Another policy, he said, is housekeepers do not work behind closed doors.
“With a Sofitel, their standards would dictate the door was either open, or at a minimum, ajar, when housekeeping is in the room,” Krauss said.
This is a practice at virtually all hotels, he said, and can be done with a latch or by leaving a cart in the doorway. New York Times News Service