Guests
Hotel & Rooms is an add-on. See What's included, and what's an add-on.
What this is for
The people staying with you. A guest record holds their details and links to every reservation and stay they've had.
Hotel guests are separate from restaurant customer records — they hold different information for a different purpose. Someone can be both.
Adding a guest
Hotel › Guests › Add Guest, or create one while taking a booking, which is when most get created.
Record what you need for the booking and for whatever identification your jurisdiction requires. Beyond that, less is better — see the privacy section below.
The booker and the occupants
Two different things, and keeping them straight matters.
- The guest on the reservation is who booked and who's billed.
- The guests on the stay are the people actually in the room, added at check-in.
They overlap most of the time and not always: a company books a room for an employee, a parent books for a child, one person books three rooms for a group.
Add every occupant at check-in. It's how you answer who was in the building on a given night — which is a safety question, sometimes a police question, and in many places a legal requirement.
Guest history
A guest record links to their reservations and stays, so a returning guest's history is one search away. Stay History holds the completed ones.
Check it before a regular arrives. Knowing someone always asks for a quiet room, or that last time the shower was broken, is what makes a return visit feel like a return.
Privacy
You're holding names, contact details, addresses and often identity documents. That's more sensitive than anything else in Restodesk.
- Collect what you need, not what you can. If you don't have a use for it, don't ask.
- Restrict who can see it. Guest permissions are separate — see What each role can do.
- Don't leave it on screen. A front desk terminal facing the lobby shows guest details to whoever is standing there.
- Delete on request, where the law where you trade requires it.
- Know your local rules on identity documents — how long you must keep them, and how long you may.
This guide can't tell you what your jurisdiction requires. It can tell you the controls exist and that you should use them.
Good to know
- Guests are per branch.
- Show, Create, Update and Delete Hotel Guest are four separate permissions.
- Deleting a guest with stay history isn't clean — the history references them.
- A guest who also eats in your restaurant may have a separate customer record. They're not merged.
Next
That's every add-on. Next: which report answers which question.