In France, anyone who rents tourist accommodation to a guest of foreign nationality — including citizens of other EU countries — must have that guest fill in and sign a fiche individuelle de police on arrival. The form is kept for six months and handed to the police or gendarmerie only when they ask for it. French guests do not fill it in. The rules are in articles R814-1 to R814-3 of the Code on the entry and residence of foreigners (CESEDA).
Unlike Spain or Portugal, France does not ask you to transmit every guest to an online portal. But the fields still have to be collected correctly, and doing it by hand at check-in is where the errors come from.
Who is concerned
- Accommodation: hotels, holiday villages, furnished tourist rentals (meublés de tourisme), country cottages (gîtes), bed and breakfasts (chambres d'hôtes) and campsites — whether rented professionally or not. Unfurnished rentals are not covered.
- Guests: every foreign national, EU citizens included. A child under 15 can be recorded on the form of the accompanying adult.
- Refusal: if a foreign guest refuses to fill in or sign the form, the host may refuse the rental.
What the form must contain
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| Field | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Surname and first names | ID card or passport |
| Date and place of birth | ID card or passport |
| Nationality | ID card or passport (and the MRZ) |
| Usual home address | Ask the guest |
| Mobile phone number and email | Ask the guest |
| Date of arrival and expected departure | Your booking |
Keeping and handing over the form
The host keeps each form for six months. It is not sent systematically: the police or gendarmerie can request it to prevent disturbances to public order, for a judicial investigation, or to search for missing persons. After six months, the forms should be destroyed — keeping them longer is a data protection problem, not extra compliance.
This article is not legal advice; check the current rules on Service-Public.fr.
Filling it in without typing
The form is short, but the identity fields are the ones most often copied wrong — a name with the given names in the wrong order, a date of birth in the US format, a nationality written as a country of residence. The reliable way is to take them from the document:
- 1The guest sends a photo of their passport or ID card when booking or at self check-in — WhatsApp is the channel most guests already use.
- 2The fields are extracted as text; the passport's MRZ carries name, nationality and date of birth with check digits, so a misread is detectable.
- 3You add the address, phone and email, have the guest sign, and delete the image.
WhappScan handles step 2: it returns name, document number, date of birth, expiry and nationality from a photo, with the MRZ decoded and validated. It does not store the form for you and does not send anything to the authorities.
Try it on the free passport and ID scanner — no signup, up to three documents a day.
For every country side by side, see guest registration in Europe by country.
Sources
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