Of course hotels take your CC, how else are they supposed to charge it? And maintenance men accessing your home without a heads-up is very much illegal and not commonplace.
They're not supposed to write the details down, which is what this person was referring to.
In Asia, they quite often take your CC details and enter it into a text field in their own system in case they need to process it later, including the CVV. Sometimes they're writing it down on paper.
They're not entering it into a PCI compliant system where the digits are masked.