Guests are the main source of revenue for hotels. They check-in when they arrive and they check out when they leave. They come one by one or as a group. They are local travellers or travellers from country all over the world. They may even carry their own currency. As times change faster and faster, we understand that there is an increasing concern as to who actually is the person staying at your hotel. Identity validation of guests is important. What do they look like? Is there any way to match the identity documents with their profile? In this blog, we will guide you into a practical solution to all the aforementioned concerns.
Security
Hotels have been tracking who is checking in and who is checking out for a long time. What if someone has a record of misconduct? Let’s say a guest in the previous year had a record of breaking the hotel rules. Of course, that person will be blacklisted, but someone has to manually check for their name, and match their ID/Passport with one of the previous years if they come to your hotel again in the future. This is important because, as a hotel manager, the first thing you want is to ensure the safety of your guests. However, this task takes time as the match/mismatch has to be done manually by an employee. In that case, a scanned ID or passport solves half of the problem.
Scan for Record Keeping
Keeping a scanned copy of the guest’s identification document is one thing. The data contained in the document will also be entered manually into the internal CRM system. This involves human interaction and it is well known that human interaction results in human errors. If we talk about security again, a mistake is much less pleasant.
Imagine that the registered guest with misconduct comes from a Latin American country or from Spain, where they often have more than one surname and Spanish may not be the language the hotel manager handles. This is an added complication. To make it even more realistic, imagine that the employee mistyped this client’s name, so it is now impossible to find his identification in the register. Two factors that are very likely to occur are leading to an unwanted guest checking back into the hotel.
Is there a seamless solution for all that?
Short answer, yes. Even shorter, OCR. Optical Character Recognition, also known as OCR, is a technology that extracts all relevant data from any document with a blink of an eye. OCR has been in the business world for many years and its full potential is yet to be unlocked. Companies use it for loyalty programs or process time reduction, but also for security purposes.
Now the technical part can be a little tricky to understand if you do not have a computer background, but we make sure to simplify to make it as simple as possible: the OCR engine is code filled with rules and keywords that are automatically applied to any given photo or PDF. For that to happen, of course, the file has to be transformed into a raw text file. The outcome procedure is an output named JSON.
Thus, all in all, the picture below acts as a visual example of how the OCR is performing. Noted that a Dutch passport has been used as an example but any other language would work.
Leap of Faith
Klippa is a software company that specializes in the extraction of data. We have an in house engine, which was originally produced for extracting data from receipts and invoices. Soon we realised that it could also be applied in other sectors. So we went on by processing scanned identity documents and passports. Our engine can extract almost anything, and that’s the result of 7 years of development. At the moment, guest registration problems and the matching of their ID/passport is something we do perfectly. With Klippa you can fully automate the check-in process for your hotel.
Leap of Faith? More like Call of Faith. Giving us a call at +31 50 211 1631 can really ease the way that ID and Passports are being processed in all the sectors. We love to hear a new challenge. So if you think that you might be needing OCR in a different way, it is a task that we are up for and can easily take.