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Comment by horsecaptin | Hacker News Reader

Do you have to provide your ID to Motel 6 if you were paying in cash?

You may well have to.

A couple months ago I managed to lose my driver's license (but not my whole wallet) on the way to the airport. Somewhat to my surprise, I didn't have a real issue with TSA. They gave me a very thorough screening but it wasn't really an issue.

However, when I got to the Travelodge at SFO, they REALLY didn't want to check me in even though I had a reservation in their system. The only way I could persuade them was to pay cash plus a security deposit and to let them make a copy of my work badge with photo. Had I not had that with me, I don't think they'd have let me check in.

Makes you wonder exactly what they think they are covering themselves from.

I doubt anyone could tell you besides "It's what our processes require." It's certainly not universal. I check into lots of hotel (probably the majority) which don't ask to see an ID.

I do know if, as a business, you handle this sort of situation much worse than the TSA does, you're probably doing something wrong.

My experience is similar to your parent comment - I've never been able to check into a hotel without showing photo ID (I never paid cash btw, always credit card, always in advance and in many cases had the print out of the booking). Same for hip boutique hotels and motels.

There was a free street concert - even for that the road was blocked on both sides and only those with valid IDs could get in.

So yeah, maybe not universal but it happens enough to be a hassle.

I found ID is the norm in Europe. But, in the US, I doubt if it's more than half the time.

My bet is: People who steal other people's reservations.

This would be especially problematic at times when all the hotels in the area are full because of a convention or sports game.

But for walking off the street? Just general idiocy. What if you stain the carpets and break the walls, then disappear? They'd need some way to know who to send the cops after.

Oh I'm sure I'm sure there's some generalized "So you can be tracked down if you do something bad."

But this was just stupid.

My reservation was in the computer.

I had a wallet full of cards including the one I used to make the reservation.

I had a photo ID, just not a government-issued one.

They could trivially have looked me up on the web if they had wanted to.

Trust me. If I'm going to scam a hotel for a couple nights stay, it's not going to be a fleabag Travelodge at SFO. It's managing risk by inflexible rules, not sensible and flexible policy. Of course, IT organizations often do pretty much the same thing.

The whole point of a government-issued ID is the trust behind it. They can be counterfeit, but the penalties for getting caught are severe.

What's the penalty for faking a Visa with picture on it? Nothing.

Of course, there's still a penalty for fraud, but if you're just taking the reservation and not taking the money that's been paid for it, then it's going to be hard to prosecute.

Presumably they take your driver's license mark-of-the-beast and submit it to the surveillance bureaus to check that you're not an undesirable, just as stores do with non-receipt returns for store credit.

It's not like it's the front line employee's or location manager's idea to informally record your identifiers "just in case" - at the very least it's a deep corporate policy. And the company didn't whimsically conjure up that requirement on its own, but was prompted to do so as part of implementing some kind of third party surveillance solution(s).

In the same spirit, I had a temp drivers license while traveling. It was just paper. With that temp driver's license I was able to:

1. Fly to New York 2. Cross international boundaries.

However a temp paper was not enough to get into a casino in Canada.

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