Form C for homestays and small properties

Last updated: August 6, 2026

The rule that makes hotels report foreign guests does not stop at hotels. If you run a homestay, a guest house, a villa you let by the week, or two rooms above the family shop, and a foreign national sleeps there, you are an accommodation provider and you have to file Form C — now Form III.

Most small properties find this out late, and often from someone official. This page is what we would want to have read first.

Does it apply to me?

Rule 17 of the Immigration and Foreigners Rules 2025 names hotels, resorts, guest houses, homestays, lodges and anyone else providing accommodation. There is no floor: no minimum number of rooms, no registration threshold, no "we're too small for this". The practical test is simple —

• Booking through a platform does not transfer it. The obligation sits with the person providing the accommodation. A booking site is not filing this on your behalf.
• Indian citizens are outside it. OCI and PIO cardholders are not. This catches a lot of properties out. An OCI or PIO card is not Indian citizenship — the holder is a foreign national, and a Form C is required for them exactly as for any other foreign guest. Our guest form has OCI and PIO as selectable categories with their own document fields, so a guest holding a card and no visa can still complete it.
• One filing per arrival, not per night. A guest staying two weeks is one filing.

What you need to file

The portal asks for considerably more than a passport number. In practice you need, from the guest:

• Passport number, place and date of issue, and expiry.
• Visa number, type, sub-type, place and date of issue, and expiry.
• Date they arrived in India, and the port they arrived at — which is a different date from when they arrived at your property.
• Their address in their home country, their next destination, and a contact number.
• A photo, and scans of the passport and visa pages.

That is 40-odd fields. Typed by hand into the FRRO portal it takes fifteen to twenty-five minutes per guest, and every one of those fields is a chance to mistype a passport number on a government filing.

The 24 hours are shorter than they sound

You have 24 hours from the guest arriving at your property — not from when they landed in India. For a small property with no night desk, a guest arriving at 10pm can eat most of that window before anyone is at a computer. See the 24-hour rule for the detail.

What small properties usually do, and why it hurts

• Photograph the passport and type it up later. Works until the photo is blurry, the guest has gone, and the deadline has passed.
• Keep a paper register and file in a weekly batch. Every guest after the first is already late.
• Ask the guest to WhatsApp their details. Now their passport number is in a chat thread on a phone that gets sold one day.
• Not file at all. Common, and the hardest position to explain afterwards.

None of these are unreasonable responses to a genuinely tedious obligation. They are what happens when the only tool available is a government portal designed for someone with a front office.

A version that fits a small property

The work is transcription, and the person best placed to do it is the guest — they have the passport, they know the spelling of their own street, and they are sitting on a plane or in a taxi with nothing else to do.

1. Send them a link, or print a QR standee. They fill in their own details on their own phone, in English, French, German or Japanese, and upload their own passport and visa photos.
2. The check-in appears in your dashboard with a countdown on it, so you can see at a glance which guests still need filing and how long you have.
3. File it in one click from the Chrome extension, on the FRRO portal, with every field filled in for you. Record the acknowledgement number against the guest.

You need a phone or a computer with Chrome and your existing FRRO portal login. There is no hardware, no front-office system, and nothing to install for the guest.

What it costs a small property

You buy a pack of check-ins and use them as guests come; there is no subscription and packs never expire, which matters when your season is four months long. The pricing page has the ladder. A new account gets 5 free check-ins — real ones, really filed — so you can see whether it works for you before spending anything.

Keeping the records

You also have to keep each foreign guest's electronic record for at least 12 months. For a property keeping paper or a phone gallery, that is the part worth fixing today even if you change nothing else: a record you cannot produce is, for practical purposes, a record you do not have.

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