Best practices for setting up a Nebula Hospitality installation access plan

Visión general

The purpose of this guide is to help managers, owners, and Salto technology partners onboard to the Salto Nebula Hospitality platform. You should read this before setting up a Nebula Hospitality installation for the first time.

The way you set up the access plan for your installation can depend on a variety of factors. For example:

• The size of your property
• The kind of devices you're using

• Whether your installation uses rooms

This section aims to provide a series of best practices when it comes to setting up your Nebula Hospitality access plan. Specifically it refers to the order in which you should create the different system entities such as access points, access rights, rooms, users, and keys to ensure a smooth setup and ongoing management.

Entity relationship

The following is a simplified diagram outlining some of the key entities in a Nebula Hospitality installation and how they are related.

Installation

• Represents the overarching structure, such as a hotel or serviced apartment complex.
• Main attributes: Name, address, time zone, digital key art, billing info.

Rooms

• Sub-groupings within an installation. For example, a hotel (installation) containing a number of individually bookable rooms or apartments (rooms).
• Main attributes: Name, access rights, activity, privacy settings, and associated management roles.

Access points

• Represent physical or logical points of entry, such as doors or gates.
• Main attributes: Name, calendar, connection type, opening mode, parent device. Can belong to a specific installation or room and interact with digital keys.

Users

• Represent people managed as user records in the system, such as staff or other authorized personnel (not guests).
• Main attributes: Name, email, access rights, and linked credential types such as app keys.

Access rights

• Define the permissions granted to users for accessing doors in the installation or specific rooms.
• Main attributes: Roles, associated rooms, and linked credential types.

Relationships

• Installations <-> Rooms: An installation can have many rooms, forming a one-to-many relationship.
• Installations <-> Access points: An installation can also have multiple access points, forming a one-to-many relationship.
• Users <-> Rooms: Users can be associated with one or more rooms via access rights.
• Users <-> Access rights: A user may have multiple sets of access rights, linking them to specific permissions or access points.
• Access points <-> Access rights: Access points belong within the permissions defined in the access rights.

Configuring access points

The first, and most important part of any installation setup, is creating and configuring the access points (electronic locks and associated devices) that belong to the installation.

There are two ways to create and set up access points in Nebula Hospitality:

1. Create the access points in Nebula Hospitality web first, then set up and configure them via the Nebula app.
2. Use only the Nebula app to create, set up, and configure the access points.

Whichever path you choose, configure access points before creating the other elements that make up the system's access plan. You can find more information about device configuration in the installer section.

Creating access rights

You should do this before adding guests or staff users to the system.

Think of access rights as groups of permissions that can be given to users to simplify the management of access to and within your property.

Some examples of access rights could be the following:

• Access to all perimeter doors
• Access to car park and main entrance
• Access to restricted staff areas
• Access to fitness facilities

Deleting access rights is not considered to be a task you'll frequently carry out. However, if an access right is actively being used by users, the system will block you from deleting it.

Creating users

You should assign access rights to users BEFORE you assign any type of key to them. If you assign a key first, users may receive a notification that they have a key, but it won't work until access rights are assigned.

It is possible for users to have multiple types of keys, but the types of keys available depend on the subscription you have purchased.

Creating rooms

If your installation contains rooms, ensure you create them after the initial installation setup.

A key best practice when creating rooms is to separate out access rights. That's to say, separate access rights that relate to communal areas (such as the main entrance, gym, or car park) from those that are room-specific (such as the room door itself). This gives you more granular control when managing guest access and makes it easier to handle scenarios like early arrivals, room changes, and post-stay access.

PMS integration and bookings

If your property uses a Property Management System (PMS), the Nebula Booking Service provides a purpose-built API for handling the full guest lifecycle automatically. Once a booking is created in your PMS, the platform can activate digital keys and access rights on check-in, and revoke them on check-out, without any manual steps.

System limitations

The following table details some of the system limitations to bear in mind when setting up an installation. This is important when taking into consideration the memory available on physical keys like keycards or fobs as well as digital keys like app keys.

Unlocking

Physical keys

If users in your installation use physical keys (cards or fobs), make sure they hold their key in front of the lock's reader until it blinks green (access granted) or red (access denied). The LED light on the lock may display short yellow blinks initially, before blinking green to indicate access granted.

Digital keys

For digital keys like app keys, it's not necessary to hold the key at the lock. Mobile devices can unlock doors at a greater distance, although the length of that distance can depend on a variety of factors such as the device type, whether there are any obstacles between the phone and the lock, or whether the phone uses NFC or Bluetooth Low Energy to unlock.

Unlike physical keys, data is sent over the air to the user's mobile phone. This means that the updating of data like access permissions takes place any time the user has a working internet connection on their phone.

Summary

The process for creating an access plan in Nebula Hospitality is broadly as follows:

Example setup

A simplified example of a possible access plan setup could be the following:

1. Create users with management roles (managers, owners)
2. Configure access points (electronic locks, gateways) - a certified installer would typically do this
3. Assign access rights to admin users
4. Create rooms
5. Add room-level access rights

7. Assign keys to users
8. Block, delete, or check out users when their stay ends

Integrations

If you are integrating with Nebula Hospitality you should use the Nebula API. See the API documentation on the Salto developer portal for more information about integrations.