How to fit C Form Plus into your check-in workflow

Last updated: August 25, 2026

The whole idea is one move: the typing happens before the guest arrives, and not by you. Your guest fills in their own passport and visa details on their own phone, from a link you give them when they book. By the time they walk in, the check-in is sitting in your dashboard with a countdown against its 24-hour deadline, and filing it to the FRRO portal is a one-click autofill from our Chrome extension — you review and submit, inside your own portal login. What changes below is only how the link reaches the guest and who does the filing: a landlord with no front desk and a hotel with one run the same machine differently.

One-time setup (everyone, about ten minutes)

• Sign up and name your property. Your account comes with the check-in link ready to share — your first 5 foreign-guest check-ins are free, no card needed.
• Complete the property address. Two minutes on the property page, and it matters more than it looks: most guests tick "I'm staying at this property", and your address is what fills the accommodation section of their Form C. Left blank, that section arrives blank at the portal.
• Install the extension. It runs in Chrome on a computer (not on a phone), signs in with your C Form Plus account, and fills the FRRO portal's form inside your own portal session — we never see or hold your FRRO login.
• Put the link in your booking confirmation. This is the single highest-value step, and it is done once. Your dashboard carries a ready-made paragraph for it that asks every guest who is not an Indian citizen — including OCI and PIO cardholders — to complete online check-in before arrival. It goes into the confirmation that already goes out on every booking, so no per-booking decision is ever needed. It deliberately does not try to sort guests first: a booking does not tell you citizenship, and an OCI cardholder can have an Indian name and an Indian address and still need a Form C. Indian citizens simply ignore the paragraph; nothing is filed for them.

What the guest sees at their end: a form on their own phone, in their own language (several are built in), where photographing their passport fills in most of the fields for them, their photo is compressed to the portal's size limit automatically, and a half-finished form survives being put down. It takes a couple of minutes, not a questionnaire's worth of an evening.

For landlords and individual houses

No front desk changes the shape of the problem: you may not be at the property when the guest arrives, and the guest may never hand you a passport at all. The workflow is built for exactly that.

• The link rides your booking message. Airbnb, Booking.com and the rest all have a saved reply or automated confirmation you already send — the paragraph from setup goes there. A guest doing a keybox self-check-in completes their Form C details from their sofa at home, days before arrival.
• You get told, wherever you are. A completed check-in lands in your dashboard and emails you. Nothing about filing requires being at the property: open Chrome on whatever laptop is nearest, sign in to the FRRO portal (registered under its Individual House path), and the extension fills the form from the guest's own details. Review, submit, and the acknowledgement number is recorded against the guest.
• A guest who ignored the message is not a crisis. Print the QR card from your property page and leave it in the house — by the entrance, in the room folder. Scanning it opens the same form, and the 24-hour clock leaves room for "please do this today" over WhatsApp; there is a ready-made message for that too.
• The finish page can do your house manual's job. After submitting, the guest can be shown your Wi-Fi details, check-out time, a contact number and a note — set once on the property page. For a self-check-in guest, that turns the compliance step into the page they actually wanted.

If you host in your own home and meet every guest, the same flow simply compresses: the link goes out when they book, and the filing is something you do from your own computer with their details already in front of you — instead of asking a guest at your dining table to hand over their passport while you type.

For hotels and guesthouses

With a desk, the goal is different: the queue. A coach of foreign guests arriving together is 15–25 minutes of portal typing each if the desk does it by hand.

• Booking confirmation first, QR standee second. The confirmation paragraph catches guests before they travel; the printed standee at reception (downloadable from the property page as a ready-to-print sheet) catches walk-ins and everyone who didn't read it — they fill the form on their own phone while they wait, instead of dictating a passport across the counter.
• The dashboard is the desk's worklist. Pending check-ins sort by deadline, each with a live countdown — "3h left" is a different instruction from "arrived yesterday", and the desk sees which is which at a glance. The extension's side panel shows the same list beside the portal.
• Staff get their own logins. Invite them from the dashboard — no shared password. Filing check-ins and verifying a guest's typed details against their passport scan work out of the box; exports, billing and deletion are switches you turn on per staff member. The FRRO portal login stays the property's own, at the desk, as it is now.
• The record keeps itself. Every filing stores who filed it and the portal's acknowledgement number against the guest — so an inspection is answered with a list, not a memory. Records stay available well past the 12-month retention duty, and can be exported with their documents when you need them out.

Edge cases: the situations that actually come up

• The guest is at the desk and never filled the form. Hand them the QR (or send the one-tap WhatsApp message from your dashboard) and check them in — they fill it on their phone in the next few minutes, and photographing the passport does most of the typing. The 24-hour clock is running, but it is a 24-hour clock, not a check-in blocker.
• No smartphone, or a guest who struggles with forms. Open your own check-in link on any phone or computer and fill it with them, passport in hand — the same photo-scan autofill works for you too. The form is the entry point either way; who holds the phone doesn't matter.
• They arrived in India months ago. Normal, and the form asks for both dates — entry into India and check-in with you. Your 24-hour deadline runs from check-in at your property; the February airport stamp is the portal's business, not your deadline.
• They turn up a day before the date they entered. Also normal — plans change. The extension will ask before filling a check-in that isn't due yet rather than assume, and everything it fills is sitting editable on the portal form for you to correct before you submit.
• The visa is expired, or expires mid-stay. The guest form warns but deliberately never blocks: an expired visa is exactly the situation you still have to file — refusing the report is the one thing that helps nobody. File it as it is; the overstay is a matter between the guest and the authorities.
• The visa is a PDF on their phone. An Indian e-visa is a PDF, so the form accepts one for the visa and passport uploads, and reads an e-visa's details out of it the way it reads a passport photo.
• They're registered as staying somewhere else. If the guest unticks "I'm staying at this property" and gives their own Indian reference address, that is what gets filed — their answer is never silently replaced with yours.
• A group arrives together. One Form C per foreign guest, and that is the point of the QR: eight guests are eight phones filling in parallel, not eight passports queued at one keyboard.
• Your balance hits zero mid-season. The guest is never blocked — their check-in is still accepted and stored. It stays locked to your team until you top up, at which point the oldest locked check-ins unlock automatically; the person at the desk never sees a paywall.

What stays yours

C Form Plus moves the typing, not the responsibility. The FRRO credentials are yours; every filing is reviewed and submitted by a person at your property, never auto-submitted; and the legal duty to register foreign guests remains yours as the accommodation provider — the tool exists to make discharging it take seconds instead of half an hour. Pricing is per check-in, with no subscription: a season with no foreign guests costs nothing.

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