Hotels and hospitality
Register a foreign guest without typing their passport
The front desk photographs the data page and gets back the name, nationality, passport number and dates, already verified. Check-in moves, and so does the queue.
What happens at the desk today
A foreign guest arrives and registration stops being routine. Someone at the desk types a name that is not in their language, a nine-character passport number and two dates in a format that is not the local one, while the queue grows and the guest stands there after a long flight.
The cost is not only the lost minute. A surname captured with one letter too many turns up later on the folio, on the breakfast list and in the guest register you are required to keep; fixing it costs more than capturing it correctly would have. And when a group of twelve checks in at once, the desk becomes the bottleneck that shows up in the review.
Photographing the passport on a phone solves nothing either: someone still types it in afterwards, only later and with less light.
What check-in looks like instead
Same desk, same property management system, one step fewer. There is no hardware to buy and no scanner to install: the phone or tablet your team already uses is enough.
- 1
The desk photographs the data page
The page with the photo and the two lines of characters at the bottom. A phone, a tablet or the document scanner already on the counter all work.
- 2
The fields come back structured
Given names, surname, nationality, passport number, date of birth, sex and expiry date, each in its own field and ready to store.
- 3
The read checks itself
A passport machine-readable zone carries check digits defined by ICAO 9303. They are recomputed on every read: when they do not agree, the system says so instead of handing back a wrong number that looks right.
- 4
The data lands in your system
Your PMS vendor, or whoever maintains your integrations, wires the response into the guest record. It is one call per document and it returns JSON.
Why this matters to a hotel
The check-in queue keeps moving
Typing a passport by hand takes about a minute per guest, longer when the alphabet is not the one the desk reads every day. A group arrival stops being half an hour at the counter.
The name is spelled right the first time
The data is read off the document, not from what the desk heard. The surname on the folio is the one in the passport, which is exactly what a foreign guest checks.
A guest register that stays consistent
Every arrival is recorded with the same fields, spelled the same way. Finding a stay from eight months ago no longer depends on how the night shift typed it.
Any passport, any country
The machine-readable zone has the same format in every issuing country. Nothing to configure per nationality, and no document costs more than another.
Do I need to buy a passport scanner?
No. A photo from the front desk phone or tablet is enough, as long as the whole data page is visible and there is no glare across the two lines at the bottom. If you already own a document scanner, that works too.
Do you store the guest passport image?
No. The image is processed and discarded; the extracted fields travel back to your system and are not retained on our side. What you keep about the guest is your decision, in your system and under your privacy notice.
Does it connect to my property management system?
Through the API: your software vendor or your IT team posts the image and receives the fields as JSON. The documentation has copy-paste examples, and an account comes with free tokens so the integration can be tested before you commit.
What if the photo is bad?
The check digits fail and the read is rejected rather than returning doubtful data. That read is not charged: the desk takes the photo again, usually with better light or without the glare off the laminate.
What does it cost per guest?
You buy tokens and each read consumes one, with no subscription and no minimum. In practice it is a fraction of the front-desk minute it replaces, and tokens do not expire.
What about guests with a national ID?
Mexican voter credentials are read by our INE service, a separate account built on the same idea: one photo, the fields come back.