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Accommodation without a staffed reception
A small accommodation business usually has one person on reception and one set of keys. Until six in the evening everything works. Then the phone calls start: a guest is stuck at the barrier, a guest doesn’t know where to park, a guest is waiting for someone with a key.
There are usually two answers, and both cost money. Either someone stays on duty until midnight, or the barrier is left open and the car park becomes public.
The third way is for the booking itself to grant access. In TraxSystem, a guest gets permissions from their own booking, for exactly the period they have paid for, and nobody on the staff has to hand them out.
A guest’s stay from booking to check-out
The booking holds the dates of the stay, the guest’s details and the registration number of their car. Before arrival the guest receives an email with full information (directions, photos, a plan, a link to the map) and an SMS with a summary and the room code. Each person gets their own message, because a code is one person’s secret.
At the entrance, the camera reads the number plate. TraxSystem checks whether there is a valid booking that covers this gate and raises the barrier; the car park barrier works the same way. The time window for the vehicle is wider than for the door, by default an hour before and an hour after, because guests arrive early, park and only then go to their room.
The room door opens with the code from the SMS. The doors along the way into the zone open too: the stairwell, the floor, the lift, the gate to the terrace.
After check-out, with a short margin, the code stops working and the number plate stops raising the barrier. There is nothing to collect or cancel, because nothing was granted permanently.
Hotel nights counted the way reception counts them
A hotel room works in TraxSystem in nightly mode. You enter the arrival and departure dates, and the times are added from the room settings: usually check-in at two in the afternoon and check-out at noon. The number of nights follows from the difference between the dates, so a stay from Friday to Sunday is two nights.
Check-out time is earlier than check-in time, and that is intentional: it means that one guest leaving and the next arriving on the same day are two separate stays with no clash between them. Changeover day is an everyday occurrence at this kind of property, and the calendar has to understand it.
Access covers the whole stay in one window, with no breaks overnight. Splitting it into nights would lock the guest out of the room every day at noon.
The guest’s registration number is valid only for the stay
The registration number given with the booking does not go into the vehicle records. It leaves behind no entry to clean up and no permission that someone forgets about. After check-out, the same car is as unknown to the system as it was before arrival.
TraxSystem checks bookings only when the vehicle has not been recognised by the vehicle records or by any vehicle group. So a booking does not intercept an employee’s or a supplier’s passage; it handles the passage that used to end with an “unknown vehicle” message.
What TraxSystem won’t do at an accommodation business
TraxSystem doesn’t sell rooms and is not a hotel management system: it has no room rates, billing, invoices, booking channels or booking engine on your website. It handles the stay and access, and sales stay where they are now.
Nor will it replace hotel locks if you already have them. It works with access control on readers, and if the doors are fitted with card locks that run on their own system, integrating with them is a separate conversation.
Without a camera at the gate, TraxSystem won’t open the barrier by number plate, because plate recognition needs a camera. Nor will it let in a guest who didn’t give a registration number, and it won’t guess that number; such a guest drives in under the existing arrangements. It also can’t check whether a guest actually stayed the night: you can see door entries and vehicle passages, but not presence in the room.
What hardware the property needs
For the full scenario you need:
- a camera at the entrance gate, if the barrier is to open by number plate,
- a reader with a keypad at the room door, if guests are to get in with a code,
- an access controller at the doors into the zone,
- a server at your premises or in our cloud.
You can start with a smaller scope: the stay calendar on its own works without any hardware, and the door code works without a camera at the gate. What will work with the devices already installed at your property is shown in the list of supported hardware.
Related
Meeting room and guest room bookingNumber plate recognitionAccess controlOn-site traffic and car parks
Further reading: A guesthouse without a staffed reception · Guest rooms on the company site