In the hotel industry across all system functions (including ACS), reliability is considered the most valuable asset. Any supplier will initially be asked to show a track record of installations in hotels spanning five or more years – and only then, perhaps, will their proposal be considered. Consequently, newcomers rarely appear in this market — both among suppliers and manufacturers. And those who manage to establish a foothold do so even less frequently… For this reason, the list of brands and suppliers of specialized hotel access systems is very modest — the kind of system variety found in the classic ACS market is nowhere to be seen here. And this situation is true not just for the Ukrainian market, but globally.
Due to the limited choice, a hotel ACS customer is often initially asked to choose a specific brand — and based on the capabilities of that specific system, the ACS is then built on the principle of “pieced together from whatever was available.” Under certain conditions, this approach has a right to exist, but it can by no means be called the only correct one — the customer must have the right to choose. Therefore, I believe that when choosing a specialized hotel ACS, one should start not from the brand, but from the specific facility.
The purpose of this series of articles is to help you correctly draw up a list of requirements for a hotel ACS and, based on it, select the optimal solution (ideally, several) from those available on the market.
So: let’s imagine that you are a designer or project manager for an integrator company that has won a tender to equip a new hotel complex with low-voltage systems. Such systems include ACS — your task is to master this specific topic. To do this, you go to the Customer and ask for a technical specification (TS), which will serve as the basis for designing the system.
As practice shows, in most cases, you will receive a “TS for ACS” ranging from “I want it just like in the neighboring hotel, only better” to “Did you see how it is in the neighboring hotel? I don’t need it that way!..”
When working with any other type of facility, you would probably just take the building floor plans and start designing. Fortunately, you have enough experience designing ACS for office centers and enterprises, and a “stack” of ready-made projects.
But I would immediately warn you against attempting to use “typical design” — unlike an office, an ACS in a hotel is a very specific system, and the list of tasks it solves can include very unexpected points for you, ranging from ensuring the financial security of the facility (try to figure out what a specific customer means by this) to energy saving and room presence detection.
So, work with the facility must begin with a conversation with the customer in order to create this very TS, or rather, I recommend starting with writing a general concept of the ACS.
Unlike a TS, the concept should be much shorter; it does not necessarily have to be overloaded with technical terms, so that even an unprepared customer can meaningfully approve it without asking you: “And what language is this written in?”.
Let’s start with a list of questions that we must ask (and then discuss what answers should be “prompted”) to the customer:
1. What type of cards should be used for guests and staff?
2. What requirements must the room locks meet?
3. What subsystems should the ACS include?
4. How is the zoning of the facility carried out?
5. What areas and rooms should be accessible to guests?
6. What tasks should the ACS solve regarding service and administrative premises?
7. Which systems must the hotel ACS be integrated with?
Based on the answers, we will be able to draw up first a short concept, and then a “normal” technical specification, which will form the basis for the design, delivery, and commissioning of the ACS.
Cards. Electronic keys SALTO
This question is placed first on purpose — depending on the decisions made regarding the type of cards used, the entire course of further conversation with the customer may change, and the circle of suppliers (or rather, competing systems) will be immediately determined.
There are not so many answer options:
a) Magnetic stripe cards.
The classic type of cards for hotels possesses only one advantage today: price (guest cards for a hotel are a consumable material, so their low price is justified as one of the important factors).
In the case of magnetic cards, for the low cost of the cards, one has to pay with serious drawbacks such as low protection against demagnetization and cloning, as well as the low capacity of the magnetic stripe.
The main disadvantage will be precisely the danger of card demagnetization, due to which a guest might fail to enter their room and be forced to go down to the reception desk for a key reissue. If this happens once during their stay, the guest will just grimace. However, if they have to go through this procedure almost every time, the hotel manager will not escape an unpleasant conversation. Most importantly, the hotel’s reputation — one of the most valuable and expensive characteristics of an enterprise in the hospitality sector — will suffer seriously.
Even if you use magnetic stripe cards with high magnetization HiCo (usually hotels use cheaper LoCo cards with a low degree of magnetization), given the current level of technology development and the amount of surrounding electronics, the probability of card demagnetization cannot be ruled out.
Cloning is another danger, as copying a magnetic card today can be done by any schoolchild. This can also lead to serious reputational and financial losses, especially if it is a cloned master key with access to all rooms in a row.
And finally, the low capacity of the magnetic stripe — due to these technological limitations, there are practically no hotel systems on the market that, besides controlling rooms, can simultaneously offer adequate capabilities for organizing an ACS for the service area of the hotel.
If, despite everything, the customer chooses a magnetic card — with almost 100% probability, you will have to include 2 different systems in the project: an electronic lock system for the rooms and a separate ACS for the service section.
Let’s also not forget that due to the contact type of reading, systems on magnetic cards are prone to wear and tear, have low anti-vandal protection (for a hotel, it sounds more like “child protection”), and climate resistance.
b) Contact smart cards.
This type of card for ACS was transitional. Such cards already have a microchip, thanks to which the capacity of the card and its copy protection are incomparable with magnetic ones, but they still require contact between the card and the reader to exchange information. This significantly reduces the efficiency of their application in access control systems, as the wear of the cards and the contacts of the reading block in the lock or reader reduces the system’s lifetime and adds maintenance problems to the engineering service after just a couple of years of operation (the contact group of a smart card reader is even more temperamental than a magnetic head).
By the way, when the problems of magnetic cards became particularly obvious, many manufacturers of hotel systems offered combined systems in which the guest still receives a magnetic card upon check-in (cheap), while the staff already uses smart cards (secure + large capacity for writing complex access rules in the interest of operational necessity).
There are also complete “Smart Systems” in which both guests and staff use cards with a microchip (there are quite a few sub-types of smart cards with different capacities and security levels, allowing the selection of cheaper and less spacious cards for guests, and conversely — more spacious and secure, but also more expensive cards for staff). However, due to the above-mentioned drawback, these systems have practically left the stage, so I would not recommend them for new hotels.
c) Contactless RFID cards EM-Marine and HID PROX.
These identifiers, which reign supreme in “classic ACS,” just did not catch on in hotel systems. They are pure identifiers on which it is impossible to write data, meaning the ACS can only be wired (otherwise, the room door controller simply won’t know that a new guest has just checked into the hotel and needs to be let into the room).
For an office, where the ACS includes a turnstile at the building entrance and a couple or dozen doors in one wing, running wires is not a problem. Especially since these same wires are often needed for security systems as well.
For a hotel with 20–50 (or more) doors, routing cables to each room can cost a pretty penny, even if the hotel is just being built (one must consider not only the cost of laying the trunk cable from the central server to the door controller but also the entire door hardware wiring). And running cable in an existing hotel will most likely be completely impossible.
Due to the higher cost of wired systems per single room, the world market for hotel ACS has evolved in such a way that virtually no wired hotel ACS remain. Therefore, besides the cable difficulties, you will definitely face problems finding a hotel system or adapting the software of an “office ACS” for hotel functions.
One should also not forget about the impossibility (or high cost) of implementing purely hotel functions when organizing access to the room (we will talk about these functions a bit later).
And finally, another very important factor: today, cloning EM-Marine and HID PROX cards is even easier and cheaper than magnetic stripe cards — this factor alone is generally enough to reject them as well.
d) Contactless rewritable RFID cards (MiFare, Desfire, iClass, Legic, etc.).
We have finally reached the type of cards that is definitively the best (at least from a technological point of view) for application in hotel ACS.
The choice of various carriers from the category of “rewritable RFID cards” is currently quite wide, which allows for selecting cards that are quite attractive in terms of cost for guests (for example, MiFare Ultralight, MiFare Ultralight C (Crypto), or ICODE cards), as well as spacious and secure cards for staff.
Let me remind you that the separation into guests and staff regarding cards comes down to the following considerations:
- guest cards, as a consumable material, must be inexpensive; the guest access plan is never particularly complex, so the card capacity does not need to be very large (in wireless hotel systems, the access plan is written onto the card itself);
- staff cards are used in much smaller quantities than guest cards (so their cost is not as critical), while the staff access plan is always a magnitude more complex than a guest’s (schedules are used here, and the number of permitted access points differs), which means a larger card capacity is required. The protection of staff cards against illegal copying must also be a magnitude higher, since in the event of any theft from a hotel room via a staff card, the hotel will have to compensate the guests for damages regardless of the circumstances (and reputational losses can turn out to be completely irreparable).
In the future, I will note other nuances of rewritable RFID cards — for now, let’s settle on the fact that this specific type of card should be considered the most high-tech, secure, and promising for application in hotel ACS.
Far from all possible variants were mentioned in this technology review: there are hotel ACS with iButton keys (“Dallas tokens,” both rewritable and non-rewritable), specialized transponders, and even biometric systems that work with fingerprints. However, such systems are either intended for very specific application conditions or are simply an exotic choice installed in at most a dozen hotels worldwide…
Now, let allow me to assume that we have managed to “convince” the prospective customer of the correctness of choosing specifically rewritable RFID cards, and in discussing subsequent questions, we will rely precisely on this technology.
—
A. V. Katrenko
Commercial Director
“Smart Security” (Russia)
To be continued in the next article…
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