Self check-in for hotels · built per property

Your front desk, running on one tablet.

Guests check themselves in — whether they booked months ago or walked in two minutes ago. They pick a room, tap to pay, and walk away holding a key. We build the software around your hotel: your system, your keys, your languages.

  • One Android tablet
  • Tap to pay
  • Writes into your booking system
  • RFID card, key box or door code
Your Hotel · lobby kiosk
Key handover

Tap the screen to walk through it. Illustrative — a real kiosk shows your rooms, your prices and your rates, read live from your system.

What the kiosk handles

Two kinds of guest walk into a lobby. It handles both.

Most self check-in products only cover the guest who already booked. A kiosk that can't sell a room to someone standing in front of it at 11pm is leaving money on the counter.

Walk-in · no booking

They book a room, at the kiosk, right now.

The kiosk sells the room itself — live availability and live prices, never a cached rate card.

  • 1Who's staying, and whenAdults, children, cot, arrival and departure.
  • 2Real rooms at real pricesRead live from your booking engine, with photos. Sold-out and too-small rooms are ruled out, not offered.
  • 3Rate choiceWith or without breakfast, priced as the true total for the stay.
  • 4Details, then the reservationWritten straight into your system as a real booking — not an email for someone to type up in the morning.
  • 5Pay by tap, then take the keyBooked first, charged second — so a guest can never be charged for a room that didn't get created.
Existing reservation

They check in without meeting anybody.

Booked direct, by phone, or through an OTA — if it's in your system, the kiosk finds it.

  • 1Surname and arrival dateTyped, or spoken if you want the voice concierge on it.
  • 2The booking is proved, liveRe-read from your own system at that moment. Too early or already departed is refused politely, not guessed at.
  • 3ID document photographedThe tablet camera shoots the passport or ID card and reads the details off it. A document photo — no face recognition, no video.
  • 4Anything outstanding is paidCity tax, the balance, a late upgrade — taken on the tablet or the reader beside it.
  • 5Key issued for their roomThe room your system assigned. Card, PIN or code — whichever your hotel already uses.
The part every hotel does differently

However you hand over keys today, the kiosk can do it.

This is the question that kills most off-the-shelf kiosks: they assume one kind of lock. We work the other way round — we look at what your rooms already use, then build the handover to match it. Tap a lane to see it on the tablet above.

You use RFID cards

We fit a card dispenser to the kiosk. It hands a card out at check-in and takes it back at the end — a return slot, not a bin of lost plastic.

  • Encoded for that guest's room only.
  • Expires by itself on departure morning.
  • Lost card? The guest proves who they are at the kiosk, the old card dies, a new one comes out.
  • Cards returned at the slot go back into stock and stop working.

Extra hardware: dispenser + encoder, mounted with the tablet.

You have a key box

The wall box with numbered compartments you already own. The kiosk finishes check-in by putting a compartment number and its PIN on screen.

  • Nothing to wire — the box stays exactly as it is.
  • Shown big, and read out loud if voice is enabled.
  • Also sent to the guest's phone, so they can't lose it.
  • No compartment assigned yet? It shows no PIN and sends them to reception. It never invents a code, because an invented code opens nothing.

Extra hardware: none. This is the cheapest lane to run.

Your doors take a code

Smart locks or a keypad on the door. The kiosk shows the code for that room, live for that stay and dead after it.

  • Room number and code together, so nobody wanders the wrong corridor.
  • Valid from check-in to checkout time, then it stops.
  • If your locks have an API we drive them; if they don't, we work from the codes you already rotate.
  • Re-shown any time the guest asks the kiosk again, after they identify themselves.

Extra hardware: none, beyond the locks you have.

Your software, your hardware

It has to fit the hotel you already run.

Two things sink a kiosk project: it can't talk to the property system, or it needs a cabinet full of hardware. Here's how we handle both.

Your property system

Little Hotelier is already integrated. Yours can be too.

We've built and run a kiosk against Little Hotelier — availability read live, bookings written into Front Desk, changes and cancellations too. That work is done and proven, not a slide.

  • Has an API? Straightforward — we integrate against it.
  • No API at all? That's the normal case, and it's the one we specialise in. Our software signs into your system and works it the way your receptionist does — same screens, same logins, same two-factor code.
  • Nothing set up at all? Paper diary, a spreadsheet, keys on hooks — we build you the system as well as the kiosk.
  • Every write is read back and checked before the guest is told it worked.
  • Little Hotelier — built, live
  • SiteMinder
  • Cloudbeds
  • Mews
  • Guesty
  • Your in-house system
  • A spreadsheet
Walk-in booking· written into the hotel's own systemillustrative
Availability read — live from the booking engine
Reservation created — Front Desk, real booking
Read back and verified — room assigned
Confirmation emailed — on your letterhead
Booking referenceLH26080357993956
Room assigned by the hotelRoom 20
Guest waited51 s
A real booking from our own live test run — created at the kiosk, then cancelled.
Hardware

An Android tablet. That's the machine.

No custom terminal, no PC in a cupboard, no six-week hardware lead time. Mount a tablet on a stand or a wall bracket, put it on the hotel WiFi, and the lobby has a front desk.

  • Tap to pay on the tablet itself — the guest taps their card or phone against the screen. No separate box.
  • Or a card reader beside it, when you need chip-and-PIN or a local scheme — girocard in Germany, Interac in Canada. We'll tell you which your market actually needs.
  • Card details go from the card to the payment terminal and nowhere else — never into the kiosk screen, never into our software.
  • Scaling up later to a floor-standing enclosure changes the housing, not the software.
What you actually need to buytypical build
  • Android tabletRuns the kiosk full-screen, locked to itRequired
  • Stand or wall mountStanding height, lobbyRequired
  • WiFiThe hotel's existing networkRequired
  • Card readerOnly if you need chip-and-PIN or a local schemeOptional
  • RFID dispenserOnly on the key-card laneOptional
  • Receipt printerConfirmations are emailed insteadOptional
  • PC, server, on-site boxThe system runs in the cloudNever
How we work

One hotel at a time, with the owner in the room.

We don't sell licences to a fixed product. Every kiosk we've built has been shaped by decisions the hotel owner made — which is why the questions below are the actual first conversation.

1

We learn your front desk

What system you run. How keys get to guests. Who arrives after the desk closes. What your receptionist does by hand that shouldn't be by hand.

2

We build it to your hotel

Your system, your key handover, your languages and your branding on screen. You watch it run against real bookings before a guest ever sees it.

3

We run it and keep it running

It stays ours to maintain. When your system changes, your rates change or a lock supplier changes, we handle it — you don't inherit a codebase.

Where we work

Based in Canada. Our kiosks stand in other people's time zones.

Remote build, remote deployment, remote support — a kiosk is a tablet and a cloud service, so distance costs you nothing. We're used to working across a time difference, in more than one language, with local payment rules that don't match ours.

  • The kiosk speaks the guest's language, not just the hotel's — German and English are running today, and adding a language is a config change.
  • Local payment reality is part of the build — EU card schemes and strong authentication rules are handled, not discovered on launch day.
CA CanadaHome base — where we build ET
EU European UnionKiosk built and running for a hotel in Germany CET
US United StatesClients served ET–PT
SA South AmericaClients served BRT–ART
Free consultation

Tell us how your hotel hands over keys. We'll tell you what your kiosk looks like.

Two or three sentences is plenty — how many rooms, what system you run, and how a guest gets into their room today. We'll come back with how we'd build it, what hardware you'd buy, and what it costs. No charge for the conversation.

  • A real person reads every message.
  • WhatsApp opens with your message written — you just tap send.
  • Don't know your system's name? Say what you see on screen — that's enough for us.
  • Nothing you type here is stored on this page.

Both buttons write the message for you — WhatsApp in the app, email in your mail client.