The Key to the Room: Collecting Las Vegas, One Door at a Time
From brass keys you could post back to the hotel, to plastic cards for fight night and Playboy, the Las Vegas room key is a pocket-sized history of the city.
I'm James Hogg, editor of Vegas Retold and the creator of its walking tours. I spent more than twenty years in Las Vegas luxury hospitality, as a butler manager at the MGM Grand Skylofts and Caesars Palace. Since then I've written the Lost Stories of Las Vegas books, and I'm a member of the Museum of Gaming History. One of my favourite things is when guests bring in their old Las Vegas treasures to show us, and one of the things we see most often is room keys. Almost every time, the next question is the same: is that hotel, or that restaurant, still there? Sometimes the answer is yes. Often it's no, and that's where the story starts. That's why I'm writing this.
A word before we start: this isn't a definitive guide. I've been collecting for more than 23 years, and there are collectors out there who know far more about room keys than I ever will. This is something gentler. I want to get you as passionate as I am about something that was made and designed to be thrown away.
A town built for overnight guests
Las Vegas has been handing out room keys for as long as it has been a town. It was founded as a railroad stop in 1905, and on January 13, 1906, the Hotel Nevada opened on Fremont Street as the first hotel in Las Vegas. Rooms cost $1 a day, and in 1907 the hotel got the town's very first telephone, number 1. You know it today as the Golden Gate, still standing on Fremont Street.
In those days, most visitors arrived by train, stepped off at the depot at the top of Fremont Street and walked to their hotel with their bags. The Plaza now stands on that spot. It opened in 1971 on the old station grounds, and for years it was the only train station in the United States located inside a casino, until Amtrak's Desert Wind service ended in 1997.
Then, in 1931, Nevada legalized wide-open gambling, and the hotel and the casino became one. On March 19, 1932, the Hotel Apache opened on Fremont Street, billed as Las Vegas's first luxury hotel, with the town's first elevator. It's still there too, as part of Binion's.
From a handful of rooms on Fremont Street, the city grew to more than 150,000 hotel rooms today. Every one of those doors needs keys, which makes the room key the most common souvenir Las Vegas never meant to give away.
The Caesars key that came home
Before the plastic card, a Caesars Palace room key was a real metal key on a fob, and the fob carried an address. If you got home and found it in your pocket, you didn't need to feel guilty. You just dropped it in a mailbox and it came back to us.
And they really did come back, about half of the time. Some of the keys guests posted home are on display today in the Caesars Palace 60th Anniversary Experience.
Caesars wasn't alone. For decades, key tags listed the hotel's name and address and promised "postage guaranteed," so a forgetful guest anywhere in the world could mail a key home without buying a stamp. It made sense: every key that came back was one less lock to worry about.
Not just the casinos
The motels did it too. Las Vegas Boulevard was once lined with them, and one of their keys has ended up in a national museum. The Henry Ford Museum in Michigan has a Tivoli Motel key on display in its Driving America exhibit. Its green and white fob reads "Tivoli Motel, 3939 Las Vegas Bl. So., Las Vegas, NV" on one side and, on the other, "Drop in any mail box. We guarantee postage." A Vegas motel key, sitting in one of America's great museums, because it tells the story of how people travelled.
Every hotel and motel in town has handed out keys, and a surprising number of them never came back.
Lost the key? Look for the fob
Even if the key itself is long gone, you can often find the fob. Keys were returned, re-cut or thrown out over the years, but the fobs were big, heavy and printed with the hotel's name, and that's exactly why people kept them. For a collector, the fob is often the better find anyway. It carries the name, the address and sometimes the room number.
Grandma's drawer
So many of these turn up in the same places: grandma's kitchen drawer, a shoebox of holiday photos, a memory box in the attic. Someone came home from Las Vegas in 1958 or 1974 with a key in their pocket, meant to post it back, and never quite did. Decades later, a grandchild finds it and wonders what it is.
What they've found is a tangible link in time. That key opened a door in the same hotel where the stars were playing that week. Whoever carried it might have seen the show, played the tables or ridden the elevator with a headliner. You can't buy a ticket to that night any more, but you can hold the key.
The hotel is gone. The key isn't.
The best example is the Landmark. It opened in 1969, after Howard Hughes bought it once construction was finished. At 5:37 a.m. on November 7, 1995, the Landmark was imploded and reduced to rubble in just seventeen seconds. Tim Burton filmed the demolition for his movie Mars Attacks!, where it plays the "Galaxy Hotel" being shot down by flying saucers.
The building has been gone for more than thirty years. But its keys are still out there, in drawers and boxes and collections. A hotel can be blown up on camera for a Hollywood movie, and you can still hold the key to one of its rooms in your hand. How cool is that?
That's the magic of room keys. Every guest has held one, most people have kept one by accident, and they're one of the easiest pieces of Las Vegas history to collect.
The cross history: one hotel, every kind of key
The best way to understand room keys is to follow one hotel through every era. Let's take the MGM Grand.
Four keys for every door
When the MGM Grand opened on December 18, 1993, it had 5,005 rooms, making it the largest hotel in the world by room count. And it opened with real keys.
Behind the scenes, a hotel like that traditionally kept four sets of keys for every door. One was at reception, ready to hand to the guest. A spare sat in a drawer at the reception desk. A third was kept behind the desk with the duty reception manager, and you had to sign that one out. The fourth lived with the casino locksmith. Do the maths: four keys for each of 5,005 doors is more than 20,000 metal keys. Even today, we still have at least one locksmith on every shift.
The plain plastic card
Then came the keycard. The invention is credited to the engineer Tor Sørnes in the 1970s, and the early mechanical cards worked with punched holes: 32 possible hole positions, giving around 4.3 billion different keys. Magnetic stripes and later chip-based RFID cards followed. The first plastic keys most Vegas guests saw were plain cards with no logo at all. Functional, and instantly forgettable.
The logo card
Then the printers worked out how to put a design on the card. At first it was usually just the casino's name and a picture. Suddenly the key wasn't just a key. It was a souvenir with the hotel's name on it, and guests started taking them home on purpose.
That was fine, and here's why. Unlike the old metal key, a card is re-coded for every new guest, so once you check out, your card will never open that door again. The days of posting keys home were over. The plastic in your pocket was yours to keep.
Fight night, restaurants and private runs
Next, hotels realised a key card was free advertising space. They printed special-occasion keys, and boxing became a favourite. Go to the fight, collect the room key. I love these.
Then came restaurant keys, promoting the hotel's own dining rooms. They're a gift for collectors, because restaurants come and go. If you know when a restaurant opened and closed, you can date the key.
Today, some groups even pay for a limited run of custom keys for their delegates, which means a convention can leave behind its own tiny piece of Vegas history.
Every one of those stages left keys behind in drawers, glove boxes and suitcases all over the world, which is exactly where collectors find them now. Follow any hotel on the Strip and you'll see the same journey: metal keys, plain cards, logos, events, restaurants and private runs. Each one tells you when someone slept there.
From my collection
My soft spot is the MGM Grand boxing keys. You go to the fight, you collect the key, and years later it takes you straight back to that night.
My favourite is Oscar De La Hoya versus Floyd Mayweather Jr., "The World Awaits," at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on May 5, 2007. It was a great fight. Mayweather won on a split decision over 12 rounds, and it set the record for boxing pay-per-view at 2.4 million buys. For fans, there was a collectible casino chip for the fight, and everyone who checked in got the fight room keys.
We made about 25,000 of them. That sounds like a lot until you do the maths. With 5,000-odd rooms and most guests wanting two keys, one full house uses around 10,000 keys, so 25,000 covered only about two and a half full houses. That's why a fight key in good condition is a lovely thing to own.
The pieces collectors really chase are the series, and the best example I know is the Palms. In 2005 the Palms ran a Playboy set with a different design every month, with characters like a naughty housekeeper or a sexy receptionist. They're very collectible today. A little back history: Playboy's licensing deal with the Palms was announced in October 2004, and the Playboy Club opened in the Palms' Fantasy Tower in October 2006.
What collectors look for
So, I haven't put you off. You've checked the kitchen drawer, found a key or two, and you're ready to join us casino collectors, or, as my wife puts it, to bring home "more stuff." Welcome. Here's what to look for.
Closed casinos
Keys from hotels that no longer exist are the heart of most collections. When a casino closes or is imploded, its keys stop being made forever.
Series and special events
Monthly sets like the Palms Playboy keys, fight-night cards and anniversary designs have a built-in story and a limited run. Completing a set is half the fun.
Dating clues
Restaurant names, logos and design changes help you put a date on a card. Old metal keys with mail-back fobs are older still.
Condition
Look for clean printing with no deep scratches, cracks or faded colours. Keys are made to be used, so a little wear is normal, but a crisp card always stands out in a collection.
Your own keys
The easiest collection to start is the one already in your drawer. Gather up the keys from every trip you've taken, put them in order, and you'll find you've already got a small history of your own Las Vegas, and maybe a hotel or two that isn't there any more.
What they're worth
In my experience, most room keys are worth cents. The most valuable can reach around $20 a key, and the Palms Playboy set is a good example of what collectors will pay up for. That's part of the charm: this is a hobby anyone can afford. The Las Vegas Advisor calls room keys "a great hobby in themselves," while noting that they are harder to get hold of than slot club cards, for security reasons, and generally don't reach the same high values. Prices change, so treat any figure as a guide, not a valuation.
Myths, fakes and reproductions
Your details aren't on the card
The biggest myth about key cards is that they store your name or credit card details. They don't. A Computerworld reporter collected stacks of hotel keys and spoke to the industry, and found that the card is just a key to your room and stores no personal data. And because each card is re-coded for the next guest, an old key won't open anything. So your old keys are perfectly safe to collect, swap or sell.
What happens to the key you hand back
Then there's the return box at check-out. Most guests assume every key dropped in there goes straight in the bin. It doesn't. Our light duty team members put the returned keys into containers of sanitizer, clean them, and send them back out to be used again, a quiet green initiative most guests never see. So if you want the key for your collection, keep it rather than dropping it in the box.
Fakes are rare
Here's some good news for collectors: there are very few fakes. When most keys sell for cents and even the best rarely pass $20, forging them simply isn't worth anyone's while. The one thing to watch is old metal fobs. Brand-new "drop in any mailbox, return postage guaranteed" keychains are sold as novelties, and some grand old hotels sell old-style fobs as souvenirs. If a "vintage" fob looks too shiny, ask questions.
Where to buy
eBay has the widest choice by far. Search sold listings, not asking prices, to see what keys really sell for, and check the seller's feedback and photos of both sides.
Facebook Marketplace is good for local finds and estate clear-outs, often for less. Meet somewhere public and look at the keys before you pay.
Spinettis Gaming, not far from the Strip, is a Las Vegas store that buys and sells old casino chips and collectibles, so you can buy commercially and in person or best go online at their store.
The Casino Chip and Gaming Token Collectors Club is a good place to meet fellow collectors. Store your keys flat in card sleeves or an album, out of direct sunlight so the colours don't fade. They have an annual Convention in June held in Las Vegas, go and visit and bring money with you, you will not be disappointed.
The memory in your pocket
That Caesars key with its mail-back address was designed to come home. Most of the keys in my collection never did, and I'm glad. For me, a room key is an excellent memory of a holiday or a trip. A boxing key is a fight night. A restaurant key is a dinner. A plain white card is a week you'll never quite remember.
So next time you check out, keep the key.
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