Kaba Hotel Locking History
The Unican Group, which included ILCO UNICAN INC, was first founded in 1964 and was a global supplier of mechanical and electronic security products. Acquired in 2001 by Kaba Holdings AG, and now Kaba Ilco, our company has been supporting the lodging industry for over 15 years. Our legacy speaks for itself with installations exceeding 1 million locks worldwide in more that 7100 hotels in North America alone.
Fun Fact
We invented the legendary mechanical pushbutton lock,
which maintains an 85% market share in the industry today.
Today, style, simplicity and scalability have long established Kaba's stand-alone access control systems as essential to the lodging industry.
We offer an original and application-specific line of electronic access controls for hotels, resorts and other lodging facilities, and a variety of complementary products that enhance guest security and access management.
Over a decade of research and development has led to integrated products that are adapted to the management structure of hotels, to the high volume of traffic and to the high turnover of guests and staff.
We make sure all our stand-alone electronic locks are tested to vigorous quality and performance industry standards. We also operate in ISO-9000:2001 certified facilities.
In 1985, we revolutionized the lodging security business with our time-based stand-alone locking system by introducing the System 1. Powered by 4C batteries, the System 1 was built in a proprietary keycard encoding format. It offered guest and staff audits, was magnetic keycard based and also provided a hierarchical staff access structure.
Then in 1992, the System 700 lock was launched and revolutionized the hotel security business yet again as the first stand-alone system to require no PC or database support. The lock featured a solid mechanical housing and had a patented clutch mechanism to prevent forced entries. On top of that, it ran on only 6 AA batteries which averaged 100 000 openings. Finally, each lock was fitted with a removable-core cylinder for emergency access by key that also registered an audit trail. Even today, there are over 600,000 System 700 locks installed worldwide.