Online check-in for your B&B: let guests fill in their details before arrival instead of at the door

It happens in every small guesthouse at roughly the same rate: the guest is standing in the hallway, suitcase still in hand, while you look for a pen. Then comes the spelling round. A surname with three consonants in a row, a street name in a language you do not speak, a date of birth the guest does not know by heart for their partner. Five minutes later you have a sheet of paper with details you will have to retype, and the guest has formed their first impression of your house: paperwork.

Online check-in moves that round to a moment when everyone has time for it. The guest fills it in at home, on their own phone, with their own spelling. You already have the details before they ring the bell.

What you actually need at the door

Before you build a form, it helps to be honest about what you really need. In practice it comes down to four categories.

Legally required details. What exactly you must register differs per country, and in Belgium sometimes even per municipality. Think names, home address, number of people, and sometimes nationality or date of birth. Check with your own municipality or tourism office what applies to you — a blog post is no substitute for that check.

Details for invoicing and tourist tax. Number of adults and children, and for business guests the company name and VAT number. Ask for that up front and you avoid correcting an invoice afterwards.

Operational details. The expected arrival time is the most valuable one of all. Next to that: are they coming by car, do they need a charging point, what time would they like breakfast.

Hospitality details. Allergies and dietary wishes, the reason for the stay, whether there is something to celebrate. This is the part that turns your form from an administrative chore into an advantage.

Why it always goes wrong at the door

The problem is not that guests are unwilling. The problem is timing. At the moment of arrival the guest wants one thing: to get to their room. You want one thing too: to welcome them. Paperwork is least welcome exactly then, so it gets done fast and sloppily.

On top of that, whatever you note down at the door usually has to be typed a second time: into your booking system, onto the invoice, into your statistical return. Every retyping round is a chance for a typo in an address, or a name that does not match on a business guest's invoice.

And most importantly: at the door it is too late to do anything with the information. That a guest arrives at 10pm, or eats gluten free, or is bringing a dog, is something you want to know two days earlier — not on the spot.

How to keep the form short enough

The most common mistake is building a form that asks everything that might ever be useful. Present twenty fields and your completion rate collapses, and you end up in the hallway with a pen anyway.

A few guidelines that work in practice:

• Make required and optional visibly different. The legal part is required, the rest is not. Guests fill in optional fields more often when they can see they are optional.
• Ask for full details only where you need them. Often a name and a headcount is enough for accompanying guests, while you need more from the lead guest.
• Make it work on a phone. Almost nobody fills this in on a laptop. Large input fields, no date pickers that need five taps.
• One screen, not a six-step wizard. Every page transition is a place where someone drops out.
• Prefill what you already know. Name, email address, arrival and departure dates are already in the booking. Making people retype those feels like badly set homework.

One important detail: the form belongs in a guest portal that the guest opens through a personal link, not in your public booking module. The booking module sells nights; the portal collects details from someone who has already booked. Those are two different moments with two different states of mind.

When to send the link

Too early and the guest forgets, too late and they are already on the road. What works well in practice: a first invitation about a week before arrival, and a reminder two or three days ahead for anyone who has not filled it in. Anyone who already completed it should obviously not get that reminder — nothing is as annoying as being chased for something you already did.

For guests coming through a booking site there is an extra hurdle: you often only have a platform alias address. Those emails usually arrive, but it pays to send the same link through the platform's messaging channel or via WhatsApp as well. We wrote about automating that message sequence earlier in automating guest communication.

Do not ask for more than you may keep

An online check-in form makes it tempting to collect everything you can think of. Do not. Every field you add is a piece of data you have to secure, justify, and one day be able to delete.

Two rules of thumb. First: only ask for what you need for a concrete purpose — legal registration, invoicing, or the service itself. Second: be careful with copies of identity documents. An upload field for an ID card looks convenient, but it is among the most sensitive data there is, and in many cases you are not allowed to simply store that copy. The full reasoning is in storing guest data and the GDPR.

What to do with the arrival time

Arrival time is the field that changes your daily operation the most. Once you know the first-floor room is not needed until 9pm and the ground-floor one is needed by 3pm, you can set your cleaning order accordingly instead of starting at random.

It is also the trigger for everything that follows. A guest who tells you they will arrive late automatically gets the instructions for getting in outside staffed hours — whether that is a key safe or a smart lock, as described in self check-in and smart locks.

It stays a welcome, not a counter

One warning. Online check-in is meant to take the paperwork out of the greeting, not to replace the greeting itself. The data goes digital, the welcome stays human. Confuse the two and you win ten minutes while losing what sets a small guesthouse apart from a hotel chain.

Equally important: never make the form a barrier. A guest who did not fill it in should still be able to walk in. You then ask at the door, with a pen — exactly like before, but once every twenty bookings instead of twenty times.

How it works in BedFlow PMS

In BedFlow PMS every booking gets its own guest portal with a personal link. You put that link in your confirmation and pre-arrival emails, or send it over WhatsApp. The guest fills in their own details — deliberately so: the portal belongs to the guest, it is not something you complete on their behalf. What they enter lands directly on the booking, where it is immediately usable for your invoice, your tourist tax return and your day planning. The arrival time shows up on that day's booking, so your arrivals list is already correct first thing in the morning.

Want to see what that looks like for your own house? Try BedFlow PMS free for 30 days — no card required. Rates are on the pricing page, and the documentation explains step by step how to set up the guest portal and the pre-arrival messages.