A ferry is a closed venue with a moving population. Everyone boards at once, spends a night onboard, and leaves at once — and in between, different groups need access to different decks, restaurants and conference rooms. That is an access-control problem with a hard constraint most events do not have: the band has to survive a pool, a sauna and a night’s sleep, and it has to be readable by staff at a glance as well as by a reader.
The work we have done for Tallink covers four different answers to that, and the differences between them are the interesting part.
Woven RFID band with an adjustable slider
The main onboard band: a woven polyester wristband with an RFID chip laminated into the strap and a plastic slider that tightens to the wrist. The slider matters more than it sounds. A one-time closure is right when a band must not be transferable — a festival gate. A slider is right when the same person adjusts it themselves over a two-day trip, and when the band goes on over a jacket sleeve on deck and under it inside.
Woven rather than printed, because a woven strap keeps its edge after being wet repeatedly. Printed fabric is cheaper and sharper for photographic artwork, but the print sits on the surface and a sauna does not treat it kindly.
Elastic band with an embedded chip
A second construction for guests who keep the band on for the whole trip: a stretch band with no closure at all, sized to slip over the hand. Nothing to fasten, nothing to break, and nothing that catches. It cannot be resized, so it goes to groups with a known wrist range rather than to a general boarding crowd.
Boarding bands
Printed fabric bands used as a boarding token — the group’s name and the sailing on the strap, no chip. This is the cheap end of the same family and it exists because not every group needs electronic access; some only need the crew to see instantly which tour a passenger belongs to.
Woven bracelet
A narrow woven bracelet, closer to a souvenir than to access control. It leaves the ship with the passenger, which is the point.
Printed lanyards
Polyester lanyards with a metal hook for crew and conference delegates. Onboard conferences run in the same rooms as everything else, and a lanyard is what separates a delegate from a passenger without another wristband on an already busy wrist.
What we would change for a similar project
If the chip and the visual identification are both needed, put them on one band rather than two. The most common brief we get is a wristband and a separate badge, and it is usually one band with a chip and a printed panel — cheaper, and one less thing for a guest to lose.
Verwendete Produkte
RFID-Stoffarmbänder · Elastische Stoffarmbänder · Armbänder aus gewebtem Stoff · Bedruckte Stoffarmbänder · Bedruckte Schlüsselbänder. Kategorien: Stoffarmbänder, RFID und intelligente Armbänder, Schlüsselbänder.
