Hotel Zoning
And once again, let us start with the difference in approaches for offices and hotels: offices often have exactly two zones (controlled and uncontrolled), with the boundary between them running right at the entrance to the building or office; hotels, on the other hand, regardless of type and size, necessarily feature a guest, service, technological, administrative, and public zone. Depending on their specialization, recreational, office, retail/entertainment, and other similar zones may be added to these. Each zone has its own access organization rules and different operating modes, so a single approach to designing an ACS for them does not exist — one has to thoroughly examine not only each individual zone but also their interaction with one another.
As an example, let us look at the most “standard” zones:
1. PUBLIC ZONE OF THE HOTEL
These are premises and/or areas where both guests staying at the hotel and visitors “from the street” can be present: the hotel lobby and restaurant area, conference halls, or SPA zones. However, the presence of hotel employees in these areas should be limited, and only those employees whose official duties are directed toward direct interaction with guests and visitors should be permitted access.
Some public zones, by definition, should not be controlled from the street-side entrance (the reception lobby, restaurant area, or night club), while others should or can be controlled (conference halls, saunas, and the SPA zone), both to monitor and account for the guests and visitors present there and to monitor the actions of the staff responsible for collecting payments and providing specific (often paid) services in these areas. And while access control to public zones and premises “from the street” is by no means always implemented, controlling movement from these zones deeper into the hotel is required almost always. Sometimes such control is carried out in both directions, for example, if service and technical premises follow immediately after the conference hall zone (which is almost always the case due to architectural features). Guests must not enter the service zone, and employees from the service zone can only enter the public zone if they possess the appropriate authority.
An even more specific (but quite frequently encountered) task is separating zones “vertically.” If the hotel is located in a high-rise building, it is advantageous to place the restaurant (at least one of them) on the very top floor to offer a magnificent view of the surroundings. A night club, on the other hand, is better placed on the very lowest floors — no one will be admiring the view from the window there, and the loud venue will be pushed as far away from the guest rooms as possible. Patrons of these establishments must move freely via the elevator, leaving the guest floors caught between two fires. This problem can be solved either by using separate elevators (which is at the very least quite expensive) or by restricting access to the call buttons for individual floors directly inside the elevator cabin, making it simply impossible to force the elevator to stop anywhere other than the lobby, restaurant, and club floors without a valid guest card. For guest convenience, access can be controlled this way not around the clock, but only during the operating hours of the night club.
2. GUEST ZONE
As the name implies, it is intended only for hotel residents. Staff, as well as visitors, can enter this zone only if they have official authorization (for employees) or at the personal request of a guest (for visitors). When designing an ACS in terms of organizing such zones, the key is to maintain a sense of proportion. If a guest has to present their card about 5 times just to get to their room (first in the elevator, then in the floor’s elevator lobby, then at several more sectional doors on the floor), you will, at the very least, not be understood…
Since both zones described above must be used by guests, the ACS in them must operate using the exact same cards used to unlock the room (this is important to remember in the event that you still have to design two different systems for guest and service applications — most often, they even use completely different cards).
The next zones we will examine relate to the service, technological, and administrative (and sometimes office) parts of the facility. The main question for all these zones will be: will the system you (the Customer) selected for the hotel rooms be able to fully cope with organizing an “office/service-oriented” ACS as well? That is, can it manage employee access with a complex security access scheme, with the ability to manage key service doors in real-time, using access schedules, anti-passback functions at the staff entrance, etc.? The factor of selecting the type of access cards must be considered separately. If it was decided to use magnetic stripe cards for guests after all, the chances of installing a single system for both the rooms and the service zone are practically zero (purely technologically, such cards cannot hold sufficiently complex access plans, which is why classic “magnetic card lock systems” have extremely limited capabilities for working with non-guest access points).
And yet, let us assume that you managed to find a system that allows simultaneous management of both the room inventory and all service premises, and at the same time, the staff within it uses convenient, durable, high-capacity, and sufficiently secure rewritable contactless smart cards. In fact, this is precisely the choice of the Customer that we “assumed” in the first part of the article, so we will continue describing the zones under the assumption that the chosen ACS possesses adequate capabilities for solving purely service-related tasks in the hotel.
I will not get carried away with a full description of the procedures for organizing an access system for service zones — they are largely identical to those in a “regular office.” I will focus only on hotel-specific nuances.
3. SERVICE ZONE
It begins right at the staff entrance. In a proper hotel, personnel are not allowed to enter the building through the same doors as the guests. There must be a separate door (entrance zone), and that is exactly where a turnstile can and should be placed (provided, of course, that the number of employees and office tenants justifies installing such a device). It is highly desirable for the ACS at this point to be online, with real-time monitoring and control capabilities. This makes it easier to organize time & attendance tracking and to manage staff keys (extending validity periods / changing access rights / blocking).
With other service premises, things are not as clear-cut. If you managed to choose the right system, you will have a choice as to which access point to install on a particular door: online (wired or via radio channel, as modern systems allow) or autonomous, using an electronic lock or cylinder. Given the scattering of service premises throughout the hotel building and the capability to record the event of an employee’s passage directly onto the card itself at the moment of unlocking, with subsequent transfer of the accumulated event audit from the card to the ACS database when passing through an online turnstile at the exit, autonomous locks and cylinders can serve as a very good alternative to expensive and fairly complex wired online access points for many service and technical rooms. Provided, of course, that the rules for organizing access to such a room and zone do not mandate mandatory real-time management.
4. TECHNOLOGICAL ZONE
In addition to controlling the access and movement of employees, the ACS must address financial security issues: monitoring the issuance of inventory and expensive materials from storage rooms (alcoholic products, food, or household chemicals), as well as sets of clean linen.
This zone also includes premises essential for the hotel’s life support systems: the server room, electrical switchboard room, water purification and treatment facilities, and rooms for ventilation chambers and air conditioning systems. All these premises are potentially dangerous points for acts of sabotage and disruption, whether for the purpose of a banal robbery of residents “under the cover” of the confusion caused by a power outage in the building, or for carrying out terrorist attacks. One should not forget that in our turbulent times, hotels, especially large ones, firmly remain among the top three most frequently attacked targets after transport facilities and government (military) structures.
Of course, one should not forget about a sense of proportion here either; after all, I have yet to meet Customers with an unlimited budget, even when it comes to security systems.
5. EVACUATION STAIRWELLS AND HOTEL EXITS
According to fire regulations, hotels face stricter requirements regarding the organization of people evacuation in the event of emergencies. There must be 2 evacuation routes from any point in the hotel, and the main grand staircases are rarely designated as evacuation routes. Far more frequently, this role is performed by specialized staircases at the ends of the building, and under normal circumstances, guests do not use these stairs. Personnel, on the other hand, use them constantly (and just like with the entrance, personnel should not use the same stairs and elevator as the guests, so at least one of the evacuation staircases is almost always a service staircase as well). That is, on one hand, it seems as if an ACS cannot be installed, but on the other hand, one would really like to…
And that is exactly how the problem is solved: on one side of the door (from the side of the exit from the floor to the stairs), there is no access control and egress is free, while an ACS is installed from the side of the exit from the stairs to the floor. Furthermore, in this case, it is necessary to use special locks or ACS equipment packages that will not violate the rules of free exit from the floor to the stairs “in a single motion” (meaning magnetic locks, unfortunately, are once again banned…). Of course, one must carefully calculate how a guest who ends up on the stairs late in the evening or at night out of curiosity or to have a smoke will later be able to return to the area monitored by staff.
—
A. V. Katrenko
Commercial Director
“Smart Security” (Russia)
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