Guide

How to control access to areas within the same event: VIP, backstage and rooms

By SOMOS DER · October 30, 2026 · 7 min read

Getting through the main door does not have to unlock the whole event. To control areas you need three things: a map that says which attendee type enters which zone, a check-in point only where the permission changes, and a decision at each point on whether people pass once (the entrance) or as many times as needed (VIP, backstage, rooms). One QR code per person is enough: what changes is the permission, not the code. If you are producing an event in Argentina from abroad, this map is the document to agree with the client and with the local team before anything else.

The underlying mistake: treating the main door as the only one

Almost every event has more than one boundary. At a concert, the field, the VIP area and backstage. At a congress, the hall, the plenary room, the speakers' room and the sponsors' space. At a club, the dance floor, the reserved area and the DJ booth. If everything is checked at the street door, the rest depends on the security person in each area recognising faces or a wristband that can be handed from one person to another.

The CISA public venue credentialing guide, from the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, puts it this way: credentialing serves to control and restrict access to a venue and also movement within it. And it separates the ticket (which gives access through the public door) from the credential, which unlocks areas that require authorization. They are two different controls, and it pays to design them separately.

Step 1: build the map of who enters where

Before thinking about scanners or operators, make a table. In the rows, the attendee types: general, VIP, press, artists, staff, suppliers. In the columns, the areas. At each crossing, yes or no. That table is the whole access control of the event, and if it is wrong, no system will fix it at the door.

Three questions that help fill it in:

• Who needs to get in, who has to be able to reach it and who has to stay out? Catering reaches backstage, but not the stage.
• Is there anyone without a ticket who still has to move around? Suppliers, technicians, drivers. They go in the table too.
• Does any permission change by day? At multi-day events, press or sponsor access is sometimes only for one day. The door checks type and sector, not the date, so in that case each day is its own sector.

In PASE that table is literally the event's permission matrix: you define the sectors and the access types, and mark which type can enter which sector. And so nobody assigns themselves a category, each attendee type registers through its own link, so whoever comes in through the press link is press without choosing it.

Step 2: a check-in point only where the permission changes

You do not need to scan at every door in the venue. You need to scan where the answer can be different. If anyone who already passed the main door can enter a room, it does not need a check-in point. If only speakers can enter it, it does.

When you set up a check-in point in PASE, it asks three things, and it helps to answer them in this order:

• What it controls: entry to the event or access to a particular zone.
• Who can pass: anyone with a valid pass, or only the types with permission for that zone according to the matrix.
• How many times people can pass: once, or as many times as needed (see the next step).

A practical budget note: check-in points are what moves the plan the most (see pricing). If your event has a general entrance plus VIP plus backstage, you are already at three points.

Step 3: once at the entrance, many times in the areas

This is the setting that gets confused the most. The main door has to be single entry: it is the one that stops two people from getting in with the same QR code, and in PASE anti double entry works across gates, so even if two scanners read the same code at the same moment, one gets in and the other is logged as a duplicate.

But a VIP steps out to smoke and comes back, goes to the toilet and comes back. An artist goes in and out of backstage ten times. A speaker enters the room, goes out for coffee and comes back in. If those points are also set to single entry, on the second pass the scanner says the person already entered and the operator does not know what to do. That is why internal areas are set to re-entry mode, which checks the permission every time the person passes without using up the pass. Another option is to give that attendee type re-entry.

Step 4: decide beforehand what the operator does with a refusal

When someone scans at an area their type has no access to, the PASE screen turns red with NOT AUTHORIZED and a note that this pass does not open that door. That settles the technical question. What it does not settle is the conversation with the person, and that has to be thought through in advance.

The same CISA guide recommends training whoever checks each zone to recognise the credentials allowed in their area, know how to deny entry and have someone to call, with zero tolerance for letting someone through without the right credential. Applied to an event in Argentina: each area operator has to know by heart which types go through there, who they call when a case is unclear (a supervisor with authority to decide) and that the answer is no until that person says otherwise. With local operators and an international audience, also agree what they say in Spanish and in English.

At clubs, concerts and any entertainment show there is also a legal framework. Argentina's Law 26,370 defines the right of admission and permanence as the owner's power to admit or exclude, as long as exclusion is based on objective conditions, equal for all attendees, and requires those conditions to be displayed in writing in a visible place at every public entrance. If an area has its own conditions (adults only, for example), they should be written and visible, not in the head of whoever is checking.

Step 5: watch each area separately while it happens

An area that fills up is a different problem from a door with a queue. The PASE live report shows entries by type, by sector, by gate and by hour, and every refused attempt is logged with its check-in point. That is useful for two things during the event: seeing whether a VIP area is filling faster than expected, and spotting whether many people without permission are trying to enter an area (almost always a sign that signage is wrong and people think that is the way through). If you load the capacity, PASE also emails a warning at 80 % and 100 %.

Capacity per zone and evacuation are governed by the venue's permit and the event's safety plan. Event safety guides deal with guest and VIP accreditation inside the crowd management chapter; for example, the crowd management chapter of The Purple Guide, the UK reference guide, places it alongside capacity limits, entry and exit controls and internal circulation. Area control is not a marketing extra: it is part of how people move inside.

One person, one QR code, and a table that says which zone each type enters. Everything else is configuration.

Frequently asked questions