World Cup boosts e-registration in Brazilian hotels

The Brazilian government has determined that 50 percent of hotels across the country should be using its guest registration system by time the World Cup takes place later this year.

The National System of Guest Registration (SNRHos) was rolled out in 2013 by the Ministry of Tourism to digitalize the manual check-in process employed by the vast majority of Brazilian hotels.

With the new system, the federal government hopes to apply analytics technology to, among other things, draw up guest profiles and get a better understanding of hotel occupancy rates in each region - therefore improving the development of public policies aimed at the tourism industry.

It took about a year of the Ministry of Tourism to develop SNRHos, at the cost of R$ 600,000 ($253,000). The system, which can be accessed online or offline, has been rolled out in Brazilian hotels since November 2012.

More than 5.9 million records have been sent to the Ministry of Tourism by 1,627 establishments since December 2012. The expectation is that at least half of the businesses that are registered with the government will have the system in place by the time the World Cup takes place in June - that means about 3,700 hotels and guest houses across the country.

According to a spokesperson at the Ministry of Tourism, the electronic system eliminates the issues of the paper-based guest registration forms, which would either be lost inside the establishment or lost in the post. This in turn crippled the Ministry's ability to analyze the registration data.

The IT team at the Ministry of Tourism is now working on improving the security and encryption of the tools within the hotel IT environment. After that, the department will work on ways to analyze the data that is being collected.