Arrival Pass: The Gate Opens as Residents Drive Up

Most of the talk about a community gate is about visitors. But the people who use the gate most are the residents, and their trip through it has not changed much in years: find the card, reach out of the window for the reader, type the code. Arrival Pass is a new resident credential in MyWatchtower that takes those steps away. The resident drives up and the gate opens.

This post explains what Arrival Pass does at the gate, where a resident's location goes (it stays on the phone), and what stays the same for the board and the manager.

What Arrival Pass is

A credential is what tells the gate that a person may enter: a card, a fob, a code or a registered license plate. Arrival Pass is one more kind of credential. It lives in the MyWatchtower mobile app, on the phone the resident already carries.

At the gate, the resident does nothing. There is no card to hold up, no code to type, no QR code to show and no stop at the kiosk. The resident drives up to the entrance and the gate opens. Arrival Pass works at staffed gates and at unstaffed kiosk gates.

That helps most on the trips that are a nuisance today: an arrival in the rain with the window up, or with a line of cars behind you at the end of the workday.

Where the resident's location goes

This is the first question a board should ask about any credential on a phone. Here is the plain answer.

The phone's location does not leave the phone. Arrival Pass does its work on the resident's own device. JEKA does not receive the location. Because we do not receive it, we cannot store it, share it or sell it. There is no location history on our servers for anyone to ask for.

The same is true for the community. The board, the manager and the gate staff cannot see where a resident is, at home or anywhere else. They see what they see for every other credential: an entry record with the resident, the gate and the time.

What stays the same for the board and the manager

Arrival Pass changes the resident's trip through the gate. It does not change who decides who enters.

• Your rules still apply. Arrival Pass is a credential under the rules your community configures, the same as a card or a fob.
• Administrators stay in charge. Credentials in MyWatchtower are issued, managed and revoked from a central dashboard. An administrator can revoke one resident's credential at once, with no change for the other residents.
• Each entry is recorded. An Arrival Pass entry goes into the activity history with a timestamp and with Arrival Pass as the entry method, next to the PIN entries, the QR scans and the license plate reads.
• A phone near the gate is not an arrival. A phone that is only near the entrance does not open the gate. Arrival Pass opens the gate when the resident arrives at it.

How it works

We do not publish that. Arrival Pass confirms the arrival on the resident's phone, and then the gate opens. The method is our own work, and we keep it to ourselves.

We do publish the parts that affect your residents: what Arrival Pass does at the gate, what it records, and where a resident's location goes. Those are the three sections above.

Where Arrival Pass fits with your other credentials

Arrival Pass does not replace the other ways in. A community can keep cards and fobs for the residents who prefer them, and license plate recognition for registered vehicles. Mobile credentials on compatible Brivo and HID hardware continue to work at the pool gate and the clubhouse door.

Visitors do not use Arrival Pass. A guest arrives with a pass that the resident sent from the app, and our guide to QR codes and PINs shows which pass fits each kind of visitor. A visitor with no pass can search the kiosk directory and call the resident. At a staffed gate, the community's gate staff process the visit in the Mission Control dashboard.

Where to start

If your community already uses MyWatchtower, contact us and ask about Arrival Pass for your gates. If you are comparing systems, the gated community access control page shows how the platform runs staffed and unstaffed gates. You can also book a demo and see Arrival Pass with our team.