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I've never once been in an actual hotel, and definitely not as a paying guest, so I base this entirely on 50+ year old movies and TV series, as well as various remarks and books/stories.

It appears as if you "check in" when you first get there, and then get a key to your room. Then, when you are going out (if you are going out during your stay), you are not supposed (or perhaps even allowed) to bring the key with you. Instead, you have to leave it in the reception and then, when you come back to the hotel, ask for it before going to your room.

Why not skip this seemingly pointless "middle-step" and just bring the key in your pocket, as it's "your" room for the moment as you are paying for it? Why require each paying guest to waste their and your own time with this "centralized storage" of the key?

And does the receptionist memorize with their photographic memory every guest and their room number? Do they actually ask for identification/passport each and every time you come back to ask for the key? If so, that sounds like an even worse waste of time and energy. And if not, what if you just say somebody else's number to gain access to their room? Or if somebody just enters the hotel and pretends as if they live there and ask for the key to room number XYZ?

And I thought the hotel snatched your passport/id/papers when you check in anyway, so you can't exactly show them to the receptionist in the scenario above anyway. And what happens if the receptionist with the photographic memory goes off his shift and somebody else stands there when you come back?

I have so many questions about this. It seems like insanity. And if it's different today, I'm still wondering about this in a historical context.

Selene Gritts
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    I presume a major reason was to avoid guests accidentally losing the key while they were out, which might require expensive replacement or rekeying. Nowadays most hotels use electronic keycards, so it costs next to nothing to replace the card and reprogram the lock if the keycard is lost, and guests are free to keep the cards with them when they go out. – Nate Eldredge Sep 22 '21 at 02:39
  • @NateEldredge Wouldn't a guest who loses their key have to pay for the expensive replacement anyway? – Selene Gritts Sep 22 '21 at 02:43
  • Well, the hotel can charge the guest, but the guest might refuse to pay without a fight, or at least be very annoyed at what they'll probably perceive as an excessive fee. Hotels like to keep their guests happy so they come back, so it is advantageous to just avoid having this happen in the first place. – Nate Eldredge Sep 22 '21 at 02:50

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This is seldom the case nowadays but it still does happen. You are absolutely right that the practice is silly and is generally unnecessary. Your question about international hotels covers an extremely wide net that includes vastly different practices across locations and property types. So, keep in mind that there are vastly different protocols and not one procedure for all international hotels but generally:

  • When arriving at a hotel, you nearly always check-in. At this point you show either a reservation or ID and staff hands you one or more keys to your room. This confirms who you are, the duration of your stay and your payment agreement (here too there are many ways this works - topics for other questions).
  • You or anyone in your party can generally go in and out of your room as you please but you normally have to leave the room locked to discourage opportunistic thieves. While you are out, cleaning staff comes in to clean the room, usually but not always daily. Most hotels have a master key or a duplicate of each room key, so they can enter while you are away. However, there are some places, usually small hotels in poor countries where copies are expensive and so they ask you to leave the key for use by staff. This also has the secondary effect of letting them know when you are away.
  • When you go back to your room during your stay, you need your key to go back in. If you left it at the desk, you have to ask for it and indeed they hand it extremely easily! You generally only need to state your name of even just the room number and they give it to you. This always seems insecure to me and I often just tell them that I'm keeping the key with me. Staff rarely objects unless it is because they need to key to clean the room and in those cases, I only leave it with them during one outing.

Now, in small hotels, it seems that they do this by memory but that may be the case only some of the time. Evening and daytime staff are not always the same, as for weekday and weekend staff and so there are times when you will leave your key with someone and get it back from someone else. The insanity is that not once have they ever asked me for ID and I've stayed in several hundred hotels in 63 countries.

This protocol would be highly unsustainable in large hotels and I have only seen it in places with fewer than 12 or so rooms. Many modern hotels now generate a magnetic key when a guest checks in and it gets invalidated when you check-out. People usually hand them to the desk to get erased. These keys can contain information identifying the customer and so should be wiped or destroyed to avoid privacy issues.

Itai
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    In the past (1970's/80's), for smaller hotels and pensions: a) prevention of loss (they were rather ugly for a reason) ; b) prevention of strangers 'wandering' around ; c) telefon calls: with the then existing older systems where a manual connection was required, one simply told the caller that the guest was not there if the key was there. ; Often, someone in the hotel knew how to exchange locks, which would be done if a key was lost under suspicious circumstances. So there were good reasons for this policy. – Mark Johnson Sep 22 '21 at 06:10
  • @MarkJohnson - Don't think the question was about historical reasons but then again, I didn't ask what period TV/movies the asker was using as reference. Loss matters when the cost of replacement is relatively high which is what I mentioned but in a significant portion of places during the past three decades, this policy is the exception. Didn't think about telephone calls but I did mention that these observation was a general overview since there are so many types of hotels in every country. – Itai Sep 22 '21 at 16:28