Glossary · 58 terms

The hotel key card dictionary

Every term you will meet in lock manuals, supplier quotes and chip datasheets — defined in plain English by people who manufacture these products daily. Bookmark it; quote it.

Radio technology & standards

RFID: Radio-Frequency Identification — the umbrella technology where a reader powers and reads a chip through radio waves. Hotel key cards, wristbands and fobs are all passive RFID credentials: no battery, powered entirely by the lock’s field.
NFC: Near-Field Communication — a subset of HF RFID (13.56 MHz) standardized so smartphones can read and write tags. Every modern phone contains an NFC reader, which is why NFC business cards and tap-to-review products work without an app.
LF (125 kHz): Low Frequency band used by older access systems and some current hotel and gym locks. Simple, unencrypted chips (EM4200, T5577), short read range, very tolerant of metal and moisture.
HF (13.56 MHz): High Frequency — the band of virtually all modern hotel locking systems and the entire MIFARE® family. Typical read range of a few centimeters, by design: close-coupling is a security feature for door credentials.
UHF (860–960 MHz): Ultra-High Frequency band read at meters of distance. Used in hotels for linen and asset tracking rather than door access — you do not want a door that opens from across the corridor.
ISO/IEC 14443: The international standard for proximity cards (≈10 cm range) at 13.56 MHz. MIFARE Classic®, DESFire® and NTAG® credentials operate under it; when a lock datasheet says “14443 Type A”, it means this.
ISO/IEC 15693: The standard for vicinity cards — longer-range 13.56 MHz credentials (up to ~1 m) such as ICODE®. Occasionally used in hospitality for lockers and amenities rather than guest-room doors.
ISO/IEC 7810 · CR80: The standard defining physical card dimensions. CR80 — 85.6 × 54 mm, 0.76 mm thick — is the credit-card format used by essentially every hotel key card.
ISO 7811: The standard governing magnetic stripe encoding: track layout, bit densities and coercivity. Legacy hotel magstripe systems encode to it.
Read range: The maximum distance at which a reader can power and communicate with a credential. For hotel HF cards it is deliberately short (2–5 cm typical) so a card in a pocket cannot open a door in passing.
Anti-collision: The protocol feature letting a reader sort out multiple chips in its field at once — why a wallet with three cards still opens the door, and why UHF portals can count a whole linen trolley in one pass.

Chips & credentials

MIFARE Classic® 1K / 4K: The most widely deployed hotel credential chip family (NXP). 1 KB or 4 KB of memory divided into sectors protected by keys. Read by most Saflok, Kaba, SALTO and many VingCard generations. “1K-compatible” cards are the volume standard of the industry.
MIFARE Ultralight® EV1: A lean, economical 14443 chip with small memory and no sector keys — ideal for disposable-issue guest cards. Common in Onity RFID estates. Typically the cheapest RFID hotel card to produce.
MIFARE Ultralight® C: Ultralight with 3DES authentication added. Issued by several VingCard Signature and Essence generations.
MIFARE® DESFire® (EV1/EV2/EV3): The high-security tier of the family: AES encryption, mutual authentication, multiple applications on one chip. Standard for Mobile Access properties, newer SALTO and VingCard deployments, and anywhere IT security teams set the spec. Costs several times a Classic chip.
NTAG® 213/215/216: NFC Forum Type 2 chips optimized for phone interaction — the chips inside tap-to-review cards, NFC business cards and smart signage. Numbers denote memory size.
ICODE®: NXP’s ISO 15693 vicinity chip family — longer range, used for lockers, amenities and library-style applications more than guest doors.
EM4200: A ubiquitous read-only 125 kHz LF chip carrying a fixed serial number. Common in older access estates, gym fobs and some budget hotel locks.
T5577: A writable 125 kHz chip that can emulate several LF formats — the standard card for cloning-friendly legacy systems and for smart locks with LF readers.
FeliCa: Sony’s 13.56 MHz standard, dominant in Japan (transit, payment, some domestic hotel locks). Not interchangeable with MIFARE® — Japanese properties should confirm which system their locks actually read.
UID: The unique identifier burned into every chip at manufacture. Simple systems grant access by UID alone; secure systems treat it only as an index and authenticate cryptographically on top.
Dual-frequency card: A single card carrying two inlays (e.g., HF for the door plus UHF for tracking, or LF plus HF during a system migration). Also used loosely for hybrid chip + magstripe constructions.
Hybrid card: A card combining an RFID chip with a magnetic stripe, letting one credential serve both old swipe locks and new RFID locks during a phased upgrade.

Magnetic stripe

Magnetic stripe: The brown or black band of magnetizable particles storing data written by an encoder and read by swiping. Predates RFID as the hotel standard; still running in a large installed base of Onity, Saflok and Ilco locks.
Coercivity: How much magnetic energy is needed to write (or accidentally erase) a stripe, measured in oersteds (Oe). The property behind the HiCo/LoCo split.
LoCo (300 Oe): Low-coercivity stripes — easy to rewrite, which suits hotel front desks re-encoding cards dozens of times. The standard for hotel magstripe keys. Vulnerable to erasure by phone cases and bag magnets, hence “my key stopped working”.
HiCo (2750 Oe): High-coercivity stripes that resist accidental erasure. Used for cards written once and carried long-term — membership and payment cards — and by some hotel systems specifying durability over rewrite economy.
Tracks 1/2/3: The three data lanes defined by ISO 7811 on a stripe. Hotel locking systems typically use track 3 (or a proprietary layout) for room access data.
Encoder: The front-desk device that writes access data onto a stripe or chip at check-in. Card compatibility ultimately means “your encoder and locks can write and read it”.

Hotel locking systems

Locking system: The complete ecosystem — locks, encoders, management software and credentials — from one vendor generation. Saflok, Onity, SALTO, VingCard, Kaba and Miwa are systems, not just locks; cards must match the system, not the door.
PMS: Property Management System — the hotel’s central software (Opera, Cloudbeds, Mews…). Integrates with the locking system so check-in automatically encodes a key for the right room and dates.
Data-on-card: An architecture (notably SALTO SVN) where access rights are written onto the card itself and carried lock to lock, letting battery locks work without network wiring. Makes chip choice stricter — the card must have the memory the system expects.
SVN: SALTO Virtual Network — the best-known data-on-card implementation. Cards ferry access updates and blacklists between offline locks and online update points.
Mobile key / BLE: Room access via smartphone over Bluetooth Low Energy or NFC. Grows fast at branded properties, yet physical cards persist for families, backup and guests who skip the app — mobile-enabled hotels still order cards, just fewer per room.
Master key hierarchy: The tiered access structure (guest, section, floor, emergency masters) encoded into a locking system. Staff credentials from a card supplier arrive chip-ready; the hierarchy itself is configured in your system.
Audit trail: The event log an electronic lock keeps of which credential opened it and when — one of the main operational upgrades over mechanical keys.
Re-encoding: Writing new access data to an existing card at the desk. RFID chips re-encode effectively unlimited times; LoCo stripes tolerate heavy rewriting by design.

Card construction

Inlay: The functional inner layer of an RFID card: chip and antenna mounted on a carrier sheet, later laminated between decorative layers. Card quality lives or dies on inlay quality and placement.
Antenna: The coil of wire or etched aluminum surrounding the card edge, harvesting power from the reader field for the chip. Damage to the antenna — cracking, punching in the wrong spot — is the top physical cause of dead cards.
Prelam: A semi-finished multi-card sheet with inlays already embedded, produced before printing and die-cutting. Factories buy or make prelam; its consistency drives read-performance consistency.
Lamination: Bonding core and overlay layers under heat and pressure into one rigid card. Sets durability, stiffness and print protection.
Overlay: The thin clear outer film protecting printed artwork from abrasion — why a year-old key card still looks printed rather than worn blank.
Die-cutting: Punching finished cards out of laminated sheets to CR80 (or custom) shape with rounded corners.
Slot punch: The oval hole added for lanyards and badge clips. Must avoid the antenna path — a spec detail your card maker handles, and a classic failure when cards are punched after delivery.

Printing & finishing

Offset printing: The press technology for photographic-quality card artwork at volume, printing CMYK plus spot colors on sheets before lamination. The baseline for branded hotel cards.
Pantone (PMS) colors: The Pantone Matching System of standardized spot colors. Supplying a Pantone code lets a factory hold your brand color within tight tolerance across reorders — in hospitality supply conversations, “PMS” can mean Pantone or Property Management System, so read by context.
Silkscreen: Screen printing used for special effects offset cannot do — metallic inks, high-opacity white, textured layers.
Spot UV: Glossy clear varnish applied to selected areas, creating shine-on-matte contrast (a logo that catches the light). One of the cheapest ways to make a card feel premium.
Foil stamping: Heat-pressing metallic foil (gold, silver, holographic) onto the card. The signature finish of VIP tiers and luxury properties.
Embossing / debossing: Raising or recessing card areas with a die for tactile branding. On wooden cards, laser engraving plays the equivalent role.
Soft-touch lamination: A matte, velvety overlay finish increasingly specified by design-led hotels — fingerprint-resistant and unmistakable in the hand.
Variable data: Per-card unique elements printed or encoded during production: sequential numbers, barcodes, QR codes, printed UIDs. Standard for casino player cards, membership tiers and audit-friendly staff credentials.

Materials & sustainability

PVC: Polyvinyl chloride — the industry-standard card body: durable, economical, excellent print surface. Roughly nine in ten hotel key cards are PVC.
PETG: A chlorine-free polyester tougher than PVC, available in food-contact grades. Chosen for long-life membership cards, wet areas and PVC-free procurement policies.
Degradable PVC: PVC with additives enabling breakdown in biologically active landfill conditions, verified by ASTM D3826/D5208 testing. Identical handling and print behavior to standard PVC — the zero-process-change eco option.
FSC® certification: Forest Stewardship Council chain-of-custody certification tracing wood from responsibly managed forests through production. What separates a documented wooden card program from a marketing claim.
Waterproof paper card: A wood-free coated paper card body with a water-resistant surface — plastic-free, priced near PVC, built to survive a stay rather than a decade. The pragmatic eco choice for high-turnover properties.
Wood / bamboo veneer card: Real wood or bamboo laminated over a standard RFID inlay, finished by laser engraving or UV print. Reads identically to PVC in every lock; guests keep them as souvenirs, which properties increasingly budget as marketing.

Missing a term you ran into? Send it over — we answer and add the good ones. For how these concepts play out in practice, see the lock compatibility hub and the cost guide.

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