Every hotel guest fills out a registration card at check-in — name, address, ID number, signature, credit card authorization. For decades, this meant a paper form on a clipboard or, more recently, a tablet bolted to the front desk. A digital registration card moves this entire process to the guest's own phone or laptop. Before they arrive, guests receive a secure link via email or SMS. They enter their details, upload a photo of their government ID, review and accept hotel policies, and sign electronically. The data flows directly into the hotel's property management system — no re-typing, no paper to file. By the time the guest walks through the door, their registration is already complete. No clipboard, no pen, no front desk line. For independent hotels still handing out paper cards, this shift isn't futuristic — it's the baseline that guests booking through Airbnb and major chains already expect.
Paper registration cards seem cheap — a few cents per form. But the hidden cost adds up fast. Front desk staff spend three to five minutes per check-in re-entering handwritten data into the PMS. Illegible handwriting causes booking mismatches and incorrect guest profiles. Paper forms pile up in filing cabinets for years, creating a privacy liability if those records are lost or breached. And for Quebec properties under Bill 96, a registration card printed only in English — or missing a French version — is a language compliance gap that guests and inspectors can flag. Run the numbers for a 60-room hotel processing 40 arrivals per day: at four minutes of manual data entry per guest, that's over 160 minutes of front desk time burned daily on work the guest could have completed on their own phone. That's nearly three hours of labor, every day, spent on a task that doesn't improve the guest experience one bit.
Canary Technologies is the most visible name in digital hotel registration cards. Their tablet-based system digitizes the form and captures signatures on a mounted device at the front desk. It works well for larger, full-service hotels with dedicated check-in hardware budgets. But for a 45-room boutique property, buying tablets, mounting them, managing device updates, and replacing cracked screens adds cost and complexity that doesn't scale down gracefully. Cloudbeds takes a different approach — their registration card module lives inside the Cloudbeds PMS, which is convenient if you're already running that platform. But if your property uses Mews, Maestro, or Apaleo, that module simply isn't available to you. Neither solution was built with Quebec's bilingual requirements as a core feature. Both default to English interfaces with French available as a translation layer — not as a native, guest-facing language option that activates automatically.
LOXE's contactless check-in flow eliminates the physical registration card entirely by moving it to the guest's own device. Here's the actual sequence: 48 hours before arrival, the guest receives a pre-arrival link via email or SMS. They enter their personal details, upload a photo of their government-issued ID, review the hotel's policies, and sign electronically — all on their phone, no app download required. The completed data syncs directly into your PMS — whether you run Mews, Cloudbeds, Apaleo, Maestro, or Opera — with zero manual re-entry by your staff. If your property uses smart locks from Dormakaba Oracode, Salto, or TTLock, the guest also receives their mobile key or digital door code within the same flow. No tablets to buy or maintain. No paper forms to print, file, or shred. No front desk queue. The guest walks in, picks up a physical key if preferred, and heads straight to their room.
For Quebec hotels, Bill 96 requires that consumer-facing communications be available in French. A paper registration card printed only in English is a compliance gap — and one that's easy to overlook when your front desk is juggling forty arrivals. LOXE's guest-facing check-in flow is natively bilingual. French and English are presented automatically based on the guest's language preference, set during the booking or selected at the start of the flow. This isn't a manual toggle the front desk has to remember — it happens automatically, every time. Your night shift staff don't need to check which card version to hand out. Your stored records are consistently formatted regardless of which language the guest used. For properties in Vieux-Montréal, Québec City, or the Laurentides that serve both francophone and international guests daily, this removes a small but persistent operational friction that paper-based registration can never fully solve.
Moving from paper registration cards to a digital flow might sound like a major technology project. It's not. For a property already running Mews or Cloudbeds, LOXE connects via API — reservation data flows automatically, and guest pre-arrival links are triggered without manual intervention from your team. Most properties go live within days, not weeks. Hotels that have made the switch typically see front desk check-in time drop from four to five minutes down to under 90 seconds, because the data entry already happened before the guest arrived. Registration data is stored digitally — searchable, backed up, and easy to retrieve for audits or dispute resolution. No more filing cabinets, no more lost cards, no more squinting at illegible handwriting. For independent hotels running 20 to 200 rooms, the calculus is straightforward: less staff time on paperwork, faster guest arrivals, cleaner data, and bilingual compliance handled automatically from day one.