Kitty Bean Yancey addresses the myth that hotel keycards irresponsibly contain personal information, that you should never leave them behind.
This has never been on my list of worries. I deal with giving my credit card information to low-paid clerks all the time. My personal information is available to a tremendous number of data center customer service reps. And there’s no such thing as privacy anymore, in any case.
The real key is how you deal with situations — checking your own financial information on a regular basis, disputing inaccurate charges, etc.
But the hotel key card thing, it just isn’t so.
Nothing to worry about as this is completely an urban legend.
http://www.snopes.com/crime/warnings/hotelkey.asp
the answer is yes and no. Not all cards will contain personal data. However some cards may contain personal data. This depends on what the hotels system has been designed to do. In the normal course there is no reason to have any extraneous data in the stripe but the room nos. However for the sake of convenience some systems simply copy the credit card data on the keycard stripe and then the sytem is designed to link up the room nos. this is a bad practise and is a risky propsition and it exposes secret data and the key card when returned can be misused. It is hence safe not to return key cards to the front desk on check out.that way there is no chance of data being compromised.