If you're short on time, here's a quick overview: Hotels commonly look at and make a copy of IDs at check-in. This helps verify reservations, prevent fraud, comply with laws, and track who is on the premises.

When you check into a hotel in 2026, the staff uses your ID primarily for identity verification and to comply with local law enforcement regulations. Under modern privacy frameworks like GDPR (Europe) or APPI (Japan), hotels are increasingly restricted from making physical photocopies or digital scans of your ID unless required by specific national security laws. Instead, they typically use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to pull the necessary fields—such as your full name, date of birth, and document number—into their Property Management System (PMS) without storing an image of the card itself. This data is often shared with local police databases for guest registration (common in Italy, Spain, and Thailand). Hotels are legally bound to delete this sensitive data after a set period, and they are strictly prohibited from using your ID photo for marketing or secondary profiling without your explicit, written consent.