OREA Hotels & Resorts has begun issuing room keys that guests carry in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet, starting with two Czech properties: OREA Place Seno in Prague and OREA Resort Sklar. The keys were confirmed as live in September 2026 and let a guest open their room with a phone or a compatible Apple Watch instead of a plastic card.
OREA is the largest Czech hotel group. Founded in December 1992 and part of the CIMEX group, it runs 19 hotels across the country on its own count, with more than 3,600 beds, spanning city hotels in Prague and Brno, spa properties in Marianske Lazne and mountain resorts in Spindleruv Mlyn, Harrachov and Sumava.
The key is issued through MyOREA, the group’s web app for online check-in, bill payment and guest services. A guest completes online check-in, selects the digital key option, and the credential activates automatically once a room has been assigned. Reception staff still verify identity documents on arrival, so the wallet key supplements the check-in process rather than replacing it.
What the credential actually is
Door access uses NFC, the short-range 13.56 MHz technology also used for contactless payments, and not a long-range UHF or RAIN RFID tag. The key is held in the secure element of the handset or watch, the tamper-resistant chip that also holds payment cards, and the exchange with the door reader is encrypted. Because the credential lives on the device, it works with no Wi-Fi or mobile signal at the door, which matters in hotel corridors and lift lobbies where coverage is often poor.
Two platform features do the practical work. Express Mode lets the guest tap the device at the reader without unlocking it or opening an app, while biometric or passcode authentication is still required to view reservation details in the wallet. Power Reserve keeps the key readable for up to five hours after an iPhone’s battery has run flat, on iPhone XS and newer. On the Android side, OREA specifies version 9 or later with NFC enabled and a current Google Wallet app.
Vingcard behind the locks
The deployment uses Vingcard’s wallet-key technology. Vingcard is the hospitality lock brand of Assa Abloy Global Solutions and has been one of the main routes for hotels into the consumer wallets, adding Google Wallet support to its Mobile Access product in June 2024 using NXP’s MIFARE 2GO credential service, alongside its existing Apple Wallet support. A significant part of the appeal for operators is that wallet keys can often be switched on across existing Vingcard lock estates rather than requiring a hardware swap.
That still leaves integration work, which is why OREA is moving property by property and checking lock-system compatibility and internal integrations before each step. Hotel Pyramida Praha, Resort Horizont Sumava and Hotel Andel’s Prague are scheduled to follow by the end of 2026. Physical room cards remain in circulation at the enabled hotels and are still used to activate the room’s electricity, a reminder that the in-room energy saver is a separate piece of hardware from the door lock. At checkout the digital credential is deactivated remotely and archived, and a change to the booking can update the key in place.
The move puts OREA alongside a growing set of operators issuing access credentials into wallets the guest already carries, among them New Zealand’s SmartStay, which introduced Apple Wallet and Google Wallet room keys, while vendors such as Safetrust push the same idea towards standards-based credentials with an Aliro migration product. For a mid-sized regional chain, the attraction is that the credential infrastructure, the secure element and the wallet app, is already in the guest’s pocket.
Read more at https://www.orea.cz/en/orea-digital-keys
