Guest registration

Every Swiss campsite operator is legally required to register overnight guests and to make the data available to the authorities on request. The legal basis is the cantonal police law (registration duty); for foreign guests, Article 16 of the Foreign Nationals Act (AuG) applies in addition. CampOne handles this registration digitally — through the guest portal, the front-desk app, or a combination.

Mandatory fields

For each guest you capture at minimum:

• First and last name
• Date of birth (relevant for tourist tax and age groups)
• Gender (required for HESTA in some cantons)
• Home address (street, postcode, town, country)
• Reason for stay (tourism, business, other)

For foreign guests, additionally:

• Nationality
• ID type (passport, ID card, residence permit)
• ID number

Some cantons additionally require the travel route (previous and next stop). CampOne shows the relevant fields automatically based on your canton.

Capture via the guest portal

After booking, the guest receives a personalised link to the portal. There they can:

• enter data for themselves and travel companions
• upload a photo of their ID (smartphone camera, optional)
• confirm the stay details

The portal is multilingual (DE, FR, IT, EN) and mobile-optimised. Entries land in CampOne immediately. By the time the guest arrives, the data is complete — the front desk only verifies and approves.

Capture at the front desk

If a guest arrives spontaneously or hasn’t completed advance check-in, you capture the data directly on the reception tablet. With an ID-card reader or passport scanner, this takes 5 seconds — the machine-readable zone (MRZ) is read and all mandatory fields are filled.

Manual entry is of course still possible; a search field finds known guests in seconds by name or date of birth.

Travel companions

You can register any number of companions per booking. For families, children are often captured with first name and date of birth only, which is sufficient in most cantons. Adult companions need full data — even if they didn’t book themselves.

A “Copy family” function carries the home address and country from the lead guest to all companions sharing the same address. Saves a lot of typing.

Data protection

Data is stored on Swiss servers (Swiss Hosted) and visible only to authorised users in your tenant. For an authority request, you export the relevant data as a PDF with audit stamp.

Retention:

• Standard: 10 years (cantonal rules)
• ID scans: 12 months, then automatic deletion
• Marketing contact data: only with explicit consent

Details under nDSG.

Mapping to HESTA

The captured guest data flows directly into the HESTA report. Specifically the report counts:

• overnights by country of origin
• arrivals by country
• breakdown by adults/children (in some cantons)

You maintain data once; HESTA report, tourist-tax settlement, and audit trail share the same dataset.

Approval and correction

Before approving a booking on check-in, CampOne shows an overview of all registered persons. Corrections are easy at this stage. After check-in the data is read-only — corrections are still possible but leave an audit-trail entry.

Tips

• Promote advance capture. A short line in the confirmation e-mail (“You can prepare your check-in conveniently here …”) raises the share of pre-completed bookings to over 70 %.
• Get an ID scanner. A USB passport scanner costs around CHF 200 once and speeds up every manual check-in.
• Set sensible defaults. If most of your guests are Swiss, set “CH” as the default country — saves a click on each entry.