Key Cards & ID Solutions for Hospitality

What Hospitality card programs need

• RFID hotel key cards
• Branded, on-property card design
• Staff photo IDs and access badges
• Loyalty, gift, and membership cards
• Reliable reorders as stock runs down

From the front desk to the back office

Hospitality runs on cards, from the RFID key that opens a guest room to the badge on a staff member's lanyard. Card Imaging supplies compatible RFID key cards, printers, and encoding, plus branded loyalty and gift card options, all backed by fast reorders so you never run short at check-in.

Hospitality runs two card programs at once and they have almost nothing in common. Guest room keys are high volume, disposable in practice, and have to work with a lock system somebody chose years ago. Staff badges are low volume, long lived, and tied to back-of-house access. Both matter, and mixing up their requirements is where money gets wasted. For how other sectors approach this, see our overview of card programs by industry.

We supply hotels, motels, resorts, clubs and restaurants across Illinois, and have since 1984.

The lock system decides the key card, not the other way round

This is the first question and it settles most of the others. Your existing locks determine what key cards you can buy, and no amount of preference changes it.

The two common families are magnetic stripe and contactless RFID. Older properties are frequently still on magnetic stripe, which works perfectly well and is cheap to run. Newer installations are usually contactless at 13.56 MHz.

We stock key cards compatible with the major systems including Saflok, Kaba, Onity, Miwa, Ilco and Securelox, in both magnetic stripe and RFID. If you are not certain what you have, look at the lock itself or the encoder at the front desk and tell us what it says. Getting this wrong means a box of cards that will not open a single door. The card and credential range lists what we keep.

Guest keys are a consumable, so buy them like one

Guests keep key cards, lose them, and put them through the wash. A property running decent occupancy gets through them steadily, and the sensible approach is a standing order rather than a panic order.

Work out your rate from occupancy rather than guessing. A hundred-room property at seventy percent occupancy with an average two-night stay is issuing somewhere around 750 keys a month once you account for second keys and replacements. That number makes ordering straightforward, and it is usually higher than people expect.

If the card carries a magnetic stripe, high-coercivity stock is worth insisting on. A guest key shares a pocket with a phone, and low-coercivity stripes lose their encoding to stray magnetic fields far more readily. Everything we stock with a stripe is high-coercivity.

The key card is a brand surface, and a cheap one

A guest handles their key card several times a day for the length of their stay. It is one of the most-touched pieces of branding a property has, and it usually gets the least thought.

Pre-printed branded stock is the low-effort option and is what most properties use. It arrives printed with your artwork and the front desk simply encodes each card as guests check in.

Printing on demand gives more flexibility. You can put a guest name on a card, run a seasonal design, or print a promotion for the restaurant on the back. It costs more per card and adds a step at check-in, so it suits properties where the key card is part of a deliberately premium arrival experience rather than a commodity.

Either way, the back of the card is useful space. Wifi instructions, restaurant hours, the front desk number, and a checkout time save the desk a great many questions.

Staff badges are a different program entirely

Back of house needs identity and access: kitchen, housekeeping, laundry, plant, cash office, liquor store. These are photo ID cards with an access credential, and the volume is a fraction of guest keys.

We program HID credentials, covering HID Prox, iCLASS SE and SR, and SEOS, in the standard formats including 26-bit H10301 and 37-bit H10304. If your back-of-house readers take HID credentials we can supply cards already programmed to your facility code and card range. That is on the prox and access card programming page, and the access credentials and encoding guide explains the terminology.

Hospitality has high staff turnover, which makes in-house printing genuinely worthwhile. A new starter badged on their first shift is the difference between a smooth start and somebody propping a fire door open.

Choosing a printer, if you need one

Plenty of properties never buy a card printer. The front desk encoder that came with the lock system handles guest keys, and staff badges are ordered from us as needed. That is a perfectly sound arrangement.

A printer earns its place when you want branded keys printed on demand, or when staff turnover is high enough that waiting on badge orders is a nuisance. For most properties a single-sided direct-to-card printer covers it, stepping up to dual-sided if you want information on the back of the key.

Our printer finder narrows it down, the printer buying guide covers the trade-offs, and the full range of ID card printers is there to browse.

Front desk realities

Whatever you buy has to survive being operated by whoever is on shift at two in the morning, including people trained six months ago by somebody who has since left.

That argues for simple equipment, a laminated one-page instruction sheet taped near the machine, and spare consumables stored where the desk can reach them without a manager. It also argues against clever setups that only one person understands.

Keep spare stock at the desk, not in a locked office. A property that runs out of key cards at midnight has a real problem and no way to solve it.

Keeping it running

Card printers and encoders collect dust, and front desks are dusty places. Clean the printer with every ribbon change and run a cleaning card through periodically.

Ribbons are consumed per card, so the yield tells you exactly how long one lasts at your volume. Our ribbon and supply range lists that yield on everything we carry, which makes a standing order easy to size.

We are an authorized service center with a bench in Woodridge, so repairs are done with genuine parts. See printer repair, and drivers and support for driver and software issues.

Letting us do the printing

For branded guest keys in quantity, having them produced and shipped finished is usually cheaper and easier than printing them yourself, and the quality is more consistent.

We print and encode cards and ship them ready to use. Send us the artwork and the details of your lock system and they arrive done. The card printing service page has the detail. Tell us your room count and occupancy and we can help you work out a sensible reorder cycle.