NFC, and what a guest phone can read

A phone reads a record, not a credential

When a phone taps an NFC band it looks for a record in a standard format and acts on it — most often by offering to open a web address. It is not authenticating anything and it is not reading the protected memory your access system might use. A band can carry both an access credential and a phone-readable record, but they are separate things in separate places, and a phone tapping the band does not gain any access rights at all.

An unlocked band is a band anyone can rewrite

Blank NFC chips ship writable, and any phone with a free app can overwrite the record in seconds. A wristband issued to the public with a writable record is a wristband a guest can point at anything they choose. We write the record and lock it read-only before dispatch. The lock is permanent by design; that is the correct trade for anything handed out at a front desk.

Encode a redirect, never a destination

Because the record is locked, whatever it points at is fixed for the life of the band. Encode this season's schedule and the band is wrong next season with no remedy. Encode a short path on a domain you control, and repoint that path whenever you like — the band never changes and never expires. This costs nothing to arrange and is the single most valuable decision on this page.

The tap is closer than people expect

Phone antennas sit in different places by model — usually near the top edge, sometimes centre-back — and the working range is a couple of centimetres. Guests find it in one or two attempts and then never think about it again, but a line of signage saying where to tap saves a surprising amount of front-desk explaining in the first days of a season. Do not promise a wave; promise a touch.