Wristband access for pools and restricted zones

The queue is the specification

A pool gate at eleven in the morning is the busiest thirty minutes on the property, and it decides everything else. A reader that takes a second and a half per guest handles about twenty-four people a minute in theory and roughly half that in practice, because guests arrive in family groups carrying towels and children and do not present a band cleanly. Two gates at ninety seconds beat one gate at forty-five every time, and it is nearly always cheaper to add a second reader than to buy a faster one.

Decide the decline before you buy anything

Every property installs the reader and then works out, live, in front of guests, what a member of staff does when the light goes red. The answer has to be decided first, because it determines the hardware. If the decline is handled by a person standing there, an audible reader and a rope is enough. If the decline has to happen without staff, you need a turnstile or a gate, which is an order of magnitude more money and a fire-egress conversation. Most resorts want the first and buy the second.

Colour does more work than the chip

A lifeguard at twelve metres cannot read a screen and will not check a band, but they can see a colour. Where the zone rule is simple — adults only, this pool is for the wing that paid for it, under-eights need an adult — a colour tier on the band enforces it continuously all day, everywhere on the deck, with no equipment. The chip is what settles a dispute at the gate. The colour is what prevents the dispute happening on the deck.

Wet hands and the read that fails

The reads that fail at a pool gate are not chip failures. They are a wet band pressed flat against a wet reader window with a wet forearm behind it, which detunes the antenna enough to drop the read at the margins. It resolves by holding the band a centimetre off the glass rather than pressing it on, which is the opposite of what everyone instinctively does. It is worth putting on the sign, and it is worth testing at commissioning with a genuinely wet band rather than a dry one from the box.