Step 7 · Zones and readers

Decide what a guest card may open, and bind each reader to its zone.

A zone is a place a guest card may open. A reader is the hardware that reads the card. Connecting the two is what turns a piece of plastic into a room key.

The idea in one picture

Guest card
   │  presented to
   ▼
Reader ──belongs to──► Zone ──opens──► a room, an entrance, or an extra area
                         ▲
            the booking attaches the card to its zones

When reception issues a card on a booking, it attaches that card to the zones the guest is entitled to: their own room, plus whichever shared areas the hotel includes.

Create the zones

Go to Zones and click Add zone.

Zone type	Use it for	Also set
Hotel room	One guest room's door. The most common type — usually one per room.	The room it belongs to
Entrance	A door every guest may pass: main entrance, garage, lift lobby	Nothing extra
User	An area only some guests get: spa, gym, executive lounge. Reception picks these per booking.	Nothing extra

Name each zone the way reception will recognise it in a list — "Room 203", "Main entrance", "Spa", "Underground garage".

A typical hotel: one Hotel room zone per guest room, two or three Entrance zones, and a handful of User zones.

Readers

Go to Readers.

You do not create readers by hand. They arrive from the gateways they are wired to, which is why gateways and devices come first. This page shows what Harmony has found.

Column	Meaning
Name / Address	How the reader identifies itself on its gateway
Description	Free text from the unit's own configuration
Gateway	Which unit it is wired to
Zones	Which zone or zones this reader opens — the field that matters
Reception name	The label reception sees when this reader is mentioned
State	Whether the reader is responding right now

Click Refresh after wiring or powering up a new reader; it appears within a few seconds.

Bind readers to zones

1

Find the reader in the table

The address tells you which physical one it is.

2

Assign its zone

A room-door reader gets that room's Hotel room zone. The front-door reader gets Main entrance.

3

Give it a reception name

If the raw address is not self-explanatory.

4

Test it with a real card before moving on

One reader, one meaning. Resist putting several room zones on one reader "so it opens everything". A reader with multiple zones grants all of them — right for a staff door, badly wrong for a guest room.

Test access properly

Do this before the hotel relies on it:

1

Create a test booking for a room you can walk to

2

Issue a card, including the entrance zone

3

Try the correct doors — the entrance and that room

Both should open.

4

Try a wrong door — a different guest room

It must not open. This is the test people skip, and the only one that really matters.

5

Check the booking out, then try the room again

It should now be refused.

If this hotel uses DNAKE or Salto Space locks instead of iNELS readers, the zone model above still applies but the credential is written by the lock vendor's own system. Set that up in Connecting other systems after finishing this step.