Introduction
CheKin is a service that automates online guest registration. In many countries you are required to register your guests in various authorities, like
police or statistic institutions. Collecting guests information and registering them at the authorities can be very time consuming.
With CheKin, you can automate the process and keep access to all the information in one place.
The service allows your guests to do online self-identification registration before their arrival.
This way you can automatically comply with legal obligations in different countries which safes you a lot of time.
You can learn more about CheKin in their
information section.
You can integrate Planyo with your CheKin account through our
CheKin guest registration extension.
The extension allows you to automatically register in your CheKin account reservations made in Planyo. The guest will be sent a link to the page where they can do a self-identification check-in
on the website hosted by CheKin.
This approach helps hospitality companies automate collection of all necessary information from a guest, both prior to arrival and already at the check-in desk.
CheKin is supported in most European countries like Spain, Italy, Germany, France, UK as well as in some South American countries. Please refer CheKin website for the latest list of the supported countries.
The setup
In order to integrate with CheKin, log in to your Planyo account, go to
CheKin guest registration in Planyo Store and click
Buy as subscription.
Then, click
Go to the setup script to configure the integration.
In the first step we need to get access to your CheKin account. We need this to manage your CheKin properties as well as register new reservations.
If you don't have a CheKin account yet, we will create one for you. On the setup page, select
Create a new CheKin account and click
Continue. A new account will be created
and you will received the login credentials on your email address. Use them to log in to CheKin Dashboard at
dashboard.chekin.io/login
and change the temporary password that we created for you.
If you already have a CheKin account, select the second option and enter your CheKin credentials.
Note that we will not store the credentials in our service. We will only use then to get the access token that will be used in farther communication between us and CheKin.
Creating CheKin properties
When a reservation is made in Planyo, we register it in CheKin under the corresponding property (also called housing). For this reason, we need to know which Planyo resource goes to which CheKin property.
This is done by mapping them together in this setup.
Before the mapping can be done, you need to add the necessary properties in your CheKin dashboard. CheKin property is quite similar to Planyo resource but with some differences.
CheKin property is a physical location (building) where your guests arrive for their stay. For this reason, CheKin property can represent either a single Planyo resource when this is a cottage or rustico, or
a number of resources like rooms or apartments that are located under the same address. Consequently, depending on the type of your Planyo resources you may need to create for them one or more properties in your CheKin account.
For example, if a Planyo resource represents a cottage (that is booked as a whole),
you need to create for it an individual CheKin property with its own address. On the other hand, if you have in Planyo a number of rooms
and apartments that are located in the same building (under the same address), you need only one CheKin property for all of them.
In order to add the properties, log in to CheKin Dashboard and go to
Properties.
Click
New property to set up the properties that represent your Planyo resources.
On the page you can also configure Police Account and Stat Account. Setting them up allows you to automate the process of registering your guests in various authorities (like police or statistics portals)
and this way meet regulations of your country.
The online check-in link
When a guest makes a reservation in Planyo, they will be sent a link where they can do a self-identification check-in prior to their arrival. There are two ways you can send them the link.
First of all, you can do this in the email message sent directly from CheKin. If your prefer this approach, you need to turn on
Send Check-in Online to guests automatically in the property settings. You can also select the email's sending time, like
When the reservation is registered or
72 hours before arrival.
On the other hand, you can choose to deliver the link in the message sent by Planyo. In such case you should turn off the
Send Check-in Online to guests automatically option for the CheKin property. Instead, you add the
$(chekin_signup_url) tag
in body of the
Reservation confirmed message.
When sending the message, we will replace this tag with the online sign-up link delivered by CheKin. It is also a good idea to add some extra information in the message so the guest knows how to follow up with
the registration process.
Another tag that could be interesting to you is $(chekin_registered_guests). When the guest uses the link to sing-up, this tag will reflect the number of guest
registered for the reservation. This allows you to use the tag in conditional statement in the
Before or after event message. This way, you can send the online registration link
again when no guest was registered yet in a certain point of time before arrival.
$(if) $(not:$(chekin_registered_guests)) $(then) message content $(endif)
For more information about conditional statements and how they can be used in templates see
Q207.
Note: in both cases, the link is sent to the email address entered on the reservation form in Planyo. For this reason, you need to make sure that the guest cannot make a reservation without specifying
their email address. You can do this by marking the email address field in the reservation form as required. You can do this in
Site settings / Reservation form layout.
Assign Planyo resources to CheKin properties
Once you have CheKin properties imported, you can do the assignment between them and your Planyo resources. This was a reservation made for a resource will be registered in CheKin under the assigned
property. Consequently, if a police account or a statistic institution is set up for this property, the guest's sign-up will be registered in these institutions.
For example, let's say that you have two room in your Planyo site:
Standard double room located in Bologna, Italy and
Deluxe double room in Bari. In such case, you should have
two properties in your CheKin account representing these two locations (respectively Bologna and Bari). When assigning the properties, for
Standard double room you should select the
Bologna property
and for
Deluxe double room this should be
Bari.
Setup finished
Once you submit the assignments, the extension is ready to work. From now own, when a new reservation is entered and confirmed in Planyo, it will be automatically registered in CheKin. According to your settings, the online sign-up link will be
sent to the guest either by CheKin or by Planyo.
