Pre-arrival guest forms: what to ask, when to send, completion math

The first pre-arrival form I ever sent had twelve fields. ID number, scan of the front and back of the document, expected arrival time, number of guests, ages of children, whether anyone smoked, whether anyone planned to host visitors, dietary requirements, prior Airbnb stays, and a free-text "tell us about yourself" box at the bottom. Completion rate: about 35%. Two guests called the form "invasive" in their reviews. One booked the apartment, never opened the form, and walked into the lobby at 03:40 with a suitcase and no key code.

This is the post about why that form was wrong, what a working pre-arrival form actually looks like, when to send it, and how to get more than 90% of guests to fill it out without complaining.

What a pre-arrival form actually replaces

Before pre-arrival forms most hosts ran a back-and-forth chat thread. "What time will you arrive?" "How many of you?" "Could you send a passport scan for the city register?" Three messages, three response cycles, often spread across two days. If a guest was abroad, the timezone gap added another half-day per round.

The pre-arrival form collapses that into one round-trip: you send a link, they fill it once, you have everything by check-in. The savings sound small per guest — maybe ten minutes — but at twenty bookings a month it is the same as one full working day per quarter spent typing the same questions into different chat windows.

The form replaces three distinct workflows:

• The arrival-time question. You need the window to brief the cleaner and to pre-stage the apartment temperature. Without it you are guessing whether to leave the heating on at noon for an arrival that turns out to be 22:00.
• The headcount confirmation. Bookings come in at "1 adult" sometimes and the actual party is three. You want to know before they arrive, not at the door.
• The local-registration data. In most of the EU and in many US municipalities, you must register guests with the police or city. Berlin, Vienna, Lisbon, Florence, Barcelona, every Russian city, half of Tuscany. The form gets the data into your hands without a passport scan over WhatsApp.

If you only run domestic short stays in a market with no registration requirement and you have a smart-lock that texts the guest the code on its own, you may not need a form at all. In every other case the cost-benefit lands solidly on having one.

The fields that matter (and the ones that don't)

After three years and a few hundred forms, this is the field list that earns its keep.

Keep:

1. Estimated arrival time — a 2-hour window is enough. Drop-down with 4 options ("morning, 08–12 / afternoon, 12–17 / evening, 17–21 / late, after 21"). Free-text time fields produce "around lunch" answers you cannot act on.
2. Number of adults / children — two number fields. Use this to confirm against the booking and to size the welcome basket if you do that.
3. Lead guest's full name and document type — exactly as it appears on the document. Required if your jurisdiction registers guests; optional otherwise. Do not ask for the document number unless your registration system needs it on the form.
4. Document upload — photo of the ID page only. One file, JPG or PDF, under 5 MB. If your jurisdiction does not require this, skip it entirely. Document scans are the field guests resist most, and rightly so.
5. Phone number reachable on arrival day — country code dropdown plus number. Even if the platform gave you a chat thread, a real number is what you need at 23:30 if a guest is lost.
6. Anything we should know? — one optional free-text field. This is where the "we have a baby, can you remove the glass coffee table" or "we land at 02:00 and will be very tired" answers come from. Keep this optional. Half of guests skip it; the half that fill it are gold.

Skip:

• Smoking preference. The house rules already prohibit it; asking implies you might bend the rule.
• Reason for travel. You will not act on the answer.
• Dietary preferences. Unless you are running a B&B with breakfast, this is small talk masquerading as a form field.
• Previous Airbnb / Booking.com stays. The platform has a profile; no host has time to cross-reference it before arrival.
• Vehicle plate number. Useful only if you have a private parking spot. If you do, ask only of guests who reserved parking.
• Multi-question "preferences" sections (towels, pillows, coffee type). Aspirational. Most hosts cannot deliver on the answers and the guest knows it.

The shape of a working form is two screens, six fields, two minutes. If yours takes more than three minutes to fill on a phone, fewer than 70% of guests will finish it.

When to send it (the 4-day rule)

The most common mistake is sending the form at booking. The guest is days, weeks, or months away from arrival; the form ranks below their flight booking, their luggage, their pet sitter. Open rates are decent (60–70%), completion rates are awful (often below 30%).

Send the form four days before check-in. By then the trip is real — packing has started, the calendar reminder has fired, the guest is psychologically primed for arrival logistics. Open rates jump to 75–85%, and completion rates land in the 60–65% range without a reminder.

A single reminder at T-1 day (24 hours before check-in) pushes completion to 88–92%. The reminder does two things: (1) catches guests who opened the original message and forgot, and (2) signals that the form is connected to actual arrival logistics, not optional paperwork. After two attempts, additional reminders just irritate.

If you have not heard from a guest by T-12 hours, switch channels. A direct message on the booking platform ("Hi — I have not received your arrival form yet, here is the link again, see you tomorrow") works far better than a third email. The form-link channel and the platform-chat channel are perceived as separate; falling back to chat reads as personal, not nagging.

Edge case: bookings made within four days of arrival. Send the form immediately with a one-line "this is what you need to fill before tomorrow's check-in" message. Last-minute bookings already self-select for organised guests; same-day completion is usually 80%+ if the form is short.

How to get a 90% completion rate

The single biggest lever is gating the door code on form submission.

If your check-in is keyless (smart lock, code-on-arrival, key-box with a numeric combo), do not send the code in the booking confirmation. Send the form first. The form's submission confirmation page is where the code appears, alongside arrival instructions. Guests then have a tangible reason to fill the form: it produces the key.

This sounds aggressive on paper. It is not. Hosts who ship the door code in the booking confirmation get 50–60% form completion. Hosts who gate the code behind the form get 90%+. The same guests, the same trip — the difference is that the form went from "another email to ignore" to "the email with the door code".

Three other levers, in descending order of impact:

• One-link form, no account creation. A magic link the guest opens directly. Forms that require Google sign-in or platform login lose 15–20% of guests at the auth step.
• Mobile-first. 75% of guests fill on phone. If the form is laid out for desktop and the file-upload button is below the fold, completion drops 10 points.
• Pre-fill the guest's name and arrival date. The platform booking tells you these. Filling them in is two seconds saved per guest, and it signals "this is for you specifically", not "fill out this generic form".

Things that do not move completion: branding, friendly copy, a thank-you GIF on submit, multiple language toggles. Guests filling a 6-field form are doing it as a chore, not as a brand experience. Make it short and disappear.

For a deeper look at the platform mechanics that produce these messages — how Airbnb and Booking.com surface chat vs email, refresh intervals, and where the form-link will actually land — see how to sync Airbnb and Booking.com calendars in one place.

What to do with the data after

The form gives you data. It also gives you legal and operational obligations.

• Local registration: in most EU jurisdictions you must submit the guest's data to the city or police within 24–48 hours of arrival. Spain and Italy have automated portals (SES Hospedajes, Alloggiati Web). Russia uses the FMS form. Germany gives you a paper Meldeschein. The form data should map cleanly to the registration system fields; ID type, ID number, name, dates of stay.
• Retention: keep the form data only as long as you need to. One year is a good default for arrival-time and party-size data — long enough to handle a chargeback dispute, short enough that you are not warehousing guest profiles. Document scans deserve a stricter rule: delete within 30–90 days unless you are required by tax law to retain longer (some short-term-rental tax regimes require 5 years; check yours).
• Sub-processors: if you use a hosted form service (Tally, Typeform, Airtable, a SaaS PMS), that service is a data sub-processor under GDPR. List it in your privacy notice. The list of "free" tools that look easy at sign-up gets harder once you read the data-processing addendum carefully.

The full picture of what you owe guests on the data side — the privacy notice, lawful basis, retention rule, deletion process — is a separate post: GDPR for short-term rental hosts. The pre-arrival form is the moment most hosts first collect personal data; treat it like the regulated event it is.

A practical retention pattern: archive the form submission to your own database, delete the document upload after 90 days, and keep the structured data (name, arrival time, party size) for a year. If you self-host, this is one cron job. If you do not, it is a process you have to remember to run quarterly.

Field-by-field example

For a Berlin apartment that registers guests under the Bundesmeldegesetz, this is the form I run today:

1. Arrival window — drop-down (4 options).
2. Lead guest full name — text.
3. ID type — drop-down (passport / EU ID card / other).
4. ID number — text. (German registration requires this.)
5. Number of adults — number.
6. Number of children — number.
7. Phone number reachable today — text + country dropdown.
8. ID photo — file upload, optional if EU citizen with valid ID card already on platform profile.
9. Anything we should know? — text, optional.

Eight fields, average completion time on phone: 1 minute 50 seconds. Completion rate after one reminder: 91% across the last 200 bookings. The two consistent failures are guests who book mid-flight and arrive before opening the form, and guests on a corporate booking where their assistant filled the platform reservation and never sees the form.

If your jurisdiction does not require ID, drop fields 3, 4, and 8. Five fields, completion rate above 95%. The form should match what your local rules and your operational reality demand — nothing more. Every extra field costs you a percentage of guests, and the loss compounds across the year.

One opinionated take

The pre-arrival form is the most under-built piece of host workflow in the short-term rental industry. Hosts spend hours per quarter on chat threads that ask the same six questions in different orders. Platforms could ship a uniform form; they don't, because the platform owns the chat thread and a structured-form workflow runs against their incentives. Channel managers ship forms; the forms are usually badly designed and over-asking.

If you take one thing from this post: open the message you sent your last booking, and count the questions in your existing back-and-forth. If it is more than five, you are paying time for data that a 6-field form would deliver in one round-trip — and the form would have a higher answer rate too. Build the form once, send it four days before every arrival, gate the door code on it, and stop typing "what time will you arrive?" into chat threads ever again. If you want a starting point that already has the form built in, the onboarding flow at RentTools sets one up in two clicks.