Prepare guests for arrival: companions and documents

Why	Have guest details in hand before arrival: the party, the documents, and the registration form arrive in the system on their own — no paper card at the front desk.
Who	Administrators and front desk staff who prepare arrivals and greet guests.
What you’ll get	Before check-in, the party, the documents, and the questionnaire answers are already in the system; if the guest hasn’t filled them in, the guest profile gets completed at the desk.
Limitations	The form does not adjust itself to the guest’s country — the set of fields is defined in advance; document files are up to 10 MB; questionnaire answers live on the guest profile, not in Messages.

Guests can take arrival preparation off your hands. In the Guest Portal — the personal page of their booking — they add companions, upload documents, and fill in the online registration card instead of a paper form. The hotel launches nothing and receives nothing by hand: the data shows up in the system, and all that is left is to review it before check-in.

What is asked of the guest

The guest signs in to the Guest Portal via their personal link from the email — no password, no app. Then, on the page of their booking, they:

1. add companions — the people traveling with them;
2. upload documents;
3. fill in the online questionnaire — the electronic version of the registration card.

All three steps happen without calls or emails to the hotel: the portal collects the details for each guest separately and shows them to the hotel team.

The portal is a regular web page: there is nothing to install, and it works from a phone just as well as from a computer.

Result: by the time of arrival the details are already collected — there is no need to take passports at the desk and fill in a form from scratch.

Companions

The hotel learns who is traveling along not over the phone and not at the desk: the guest enters companions themselves, and each of them gets their own set of fields.

The makeup of the party is visible on the booking card: the “Rooms and guests” tab, the “Guests” block. The same tab has the “Edit guest” and “Add guest” buttons — for fixing the list on the spot.

Each room in the booking keeps its own list of guests, so a party spread over several rooms is visible in full.

Documents

The guest uploads documents to the portal themselves, each as a file of up to 10 MB. The files land on the guest profile and are visible to the hotel team: no need to have them emailed over or filed into a separate folder.

What is uploaded does not vanish after the stay either: the files live on the guest profile, so they are already at hand for the next visit.

And if paper copies are still needed, the guest’s document scans can be printed from the booking — the second print scenario, right next to the voucher.

Passport details are protected: they are encrypted at the application level (AES-256), and staff access is scoped by roles.

The online registration card

The online questionnaire is the registration card in electronic form, and it already works: the guest fills it in without paper — in advance, from a phone, not at the desk and not in a hurry. The set of fields and which of them are required are defined in advance — country profiles are built into the system, including the Baltic states and the European Union. These are ready-made settings, not a “smart” form: the fields do not rearrange themselves for a particular guest’s country.

The questionnaire answers arrive on the guest profile — that is where to look for them. They do not land in the Messages section: that section is for guest emails and questions, not for registration details. How portal questions differ from the questionnaire — in the article Questions from the Guest Portal.

Nothing is needed from the hotel

The questionnaire and the documents arrive in the system on their own: there is nothing to request separately, receive by email, or copy over by hand. Preparing for such an arrival is a single review:

1. Before check-in, open the guest profile: it holds the documents and the questionnaire answers. The makeup of the party is on the booking card, under the “Rooms and guests” tab.
2. Check the details against what the guest sent in; anything to fix can be edited right on the profile.

Result: the guest walks up to the desk with a complete profile — all that is left is to check them in.

If the review shows that some details never arrived, the next section covers completing the profile at the desk.

If the guest has not filled it in

Sometimes the guest never opens the portal before arrival. Then complete the profile for them at the front desk — the fields on the guest profile are the same as in the online form, so nothing has to be entered twice.

1. Open the booking card → the “Rooms and guests” tab → “Edit guest”.
2. Fill in the fields: last name, first name, phone, email, country, language, date of birth, place of birth, gender, and passport details — then save.
3. With the passport at hand, the guest profile can be filled in from its scan: the system recognizes the document and enters the details itself.

If the guest has stayed with you before, their profile turns up in the Guests section by searching last name, first name, or phone number — no need to enter the contact details twice.

Result: even without the portal, the registration card never turns back into paper — the details live on the guest profile and stay in the system for the next stay.

See also

• The guest’s personal link: preview and reissue — how the guest gets into the portal and what to do when the link is lost.
• Guest profiles: history, notes, files, duplicates — where the details guests send in themselves are stored.
• Check-in and check-out — what to do with a complete profile on arrival day.