What's new in HolidayHero: end of September 2026
Guests can now scan a passport with their phone camera and sign the rental agreement before they travel, online check-in has been rebuilt for mobile, and arrivals have their own screen instead of a filter on the reservations list.
Check-in, rebuilt for the phone it actually happens on
Online check-in worked, but it was built for a desktop screen and asked more of the guest than it needed to. Guests dropped out halfway, and whatever they did not finish came back to reception on arrival day.
The guest-side flow has been rebuilt from the ground up. It is mobile-first, runs in the browser with no app to download, no account and no password, and takes fewer steps to complete. The information it collects is unchanged, so nothing you rely on downstream has moved.
Nothing to switch on. Existing check-in links open the new flow.
Scan a passport with the camera instead of typing it
Document details were the slowest part of check-in for the guest and the most error-prone part for you. A mistyped document number is a wrong record you find out about later.
Guests can now scan a passport or ID document with their phone camera as part of online check-in. The scan reads the document and fills the form fields, so the guest corrects rather than types.
Be clear with your team about what this does: it reads a document and fills fields. It does not verify identity and it does not check for fraud. Worn documents and poor light reduce the read, so every field stays editable and the guest can always type the details by hand instead.
Sign the rental agreement before anyone arrives
Getting a signature meant printing, or a PDF by email, or a clipboard at the desk while a tired guest read two pages standing up. Most properties gave up and collected them on arrival.
Guests can now sign a rental agreement, house rules or terms on their phone screen, as part of online check-in. The signed document is stored against the guest record and is available to you from the reservation.
Which documents require a signature is set per property, so a park can attach its park rules and an aparthotel its damage terms without either seeing the other's.
Arrivals have their own screen now
Arrivals lived as a filter on the reservations list, which meant the person working a changeover day was working the wrong list. Reservations answer a commercial question. Arrivals answer an operational one.
The check-ins view is a separate screen. It shows who is arriving today, who has completed online check-in and who has not, and opens the guest record straight from the row.
At 15:00 on a changeover day that turns sixty arrivals into a short list of exceptions. It is available to any staff role that already has access to reservations, so there is nothing to grant.
Under the hood
Stability improvements across online check-in, guest records and reservation sync.
Hjalte is CEO and co-founder of HolidayHero, an Amsterdam-based platform that runs the whole guest stay for hotels, holiday parks, hostels, aparthotels and short-term rentals. He also runs a rental property himself, which is a decent cure for building features nobody asked for. Most of his writing here is product: new integrations, guest registration and compliance work, and the reasoning behind decisions that show up in your account a few weeks later.
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