Board card printing at scale – Software solutions trusted by maritime and more

AIDA, cruise with a smile

AIDA Cruises is the leading German cruise line, which allows passengers to experience a lifestyle-oriented, casual vacation.

The cruises on offer range from regional to around the world, with destinations in Europe, North America and the Caribbean, Middle East, Asia and Africa.

AIDA operates one of the most modern and eco-friendly fleets in the industry, with an overall capacity approaching 40000 passengers.

Country

Germany

Industry

Travel, Cruising

Company size

Enterprise (10000+)

Challenge

Thousands of boarding cards. Every week.

Once on board, every AIDA guest receives a personalized boarding card that acts as identification, a means of payment, and a cabin door key.

With guests typically rotating on a weekly basis, thousands of cards need to be printed on every ship — every week.

Legacy, manually operated card printers could only deliver up to 3 cards per minute. That meant producing the required cards could take up to two full workdays per cruise — not including the additional time needed to program RFID chips for door lock access.

Solution

Automated boarding card production

We delivered a comprehensive solution that enables fully automated, unsupervised batch printing of boarding cards.

We combined industrial-grade card printing with proprietary RFID chip programming technology, ensuring that all cards are fully compatible with Assa Abloy / VingCard anti-cloning protection.

The system supports batch printing on up to 4 devices in parallel, working with card printers from Axess, NBS, Zebra, and Evolis, up to the Quantum 2 model designed for mass production.

Multiple Omnikey RFID encoders are supported, enabling the programming of a wide range of RFID devices — including cards, wristbands, and other wearable solutions.