Digital guest register in Austria: feratel shows how it works

Around 1,200 municipalities, including almost all of the country's major tourist destinations, rely on this solution. This means that around 80 percent of all guest registrations are processed via feratel. Nine out of ten processes are already automated, either directly via interfaces to more than 170 hotel programmes, via entries in the feratel WebClient or via guests themselves using online check-in. The system's performance is impressive on record days: on 15 February this year, for example, over 400,000 arrivals were processed in a single day.

The system not only meets the legal requirements for registration, but also offers numerous additional functions. These include the digital guest register for hosts, convenient online check-in for guests with passport scanning and digital signatures, as well as automatic billing and prescription of taxes with integrated interfaces to accounting systems and Statistics Austria for seamless data transfer. In addition, modern business intelligence tools enable municipalities and tourism associations to evaluate registration data in real time on a daily basis and use it strategically.

Digital registration not only leads to administrative savings for all parties involved with better data quality, but also offers guests a better (smart) holiday experience: convenient online check-in saves valuable time. Digital guest cards, ski tickets or free tickets for use on public transport are also personalised and automatically delivered to registered guests via the registration system, as well as being made available in holiday apps for use on smartphones.

Burgenland shows how successful the changeover can be. In 2022, fully digital guest registration was introduced across the board – a nationwide project that was implemented within a short period of time and impressively confirmed its practicality.

In Salzburg (after South Tyrol), a nationwide solution for free public transport use for all registered guests was implemented for the first time in Austria in 2025. Since May, 2.8 million tickets have been issued there via the registration system. For guests in numerous destinations, such as Tyrol, the digital registration system running in the background has long been an essential and indispensable prerequisite for their smart holiday experience, which is constantly being expanded and enhanced by the destinations.

feratel is the technology partner of Austrian tourism. The solution is modular, tried and tested, and is continuously being developed. This means that the digital guest register is no longer a vision of the future, but a reality that municipalities, states, and tourism organisations are successfully relying on.