Definition
Guest identity resolution.
The process of matching and merging fragmented records about the same hotel guest into one authoritative profile, across every system the group operates.
A guest who has stayed with a group many times can exist as several separate records: one per property management system, another in the point of sale, another in the booking engine, another again from an OTA booking that arrived with a proxy email address. None of those records points at the others. To the systems, they are different people. To the team at check-in, the guest is a stranger arriving for the first time.
Guest identity resolution is the process that fixes this. It reads every source, finds the signals that indicate the same person, and merges the fragments into one verified record: the Master Profile.
How it works, in short
- Exact match signals: verified email address, loyalty programme number, phone number
- Probabilistic signals: name variant matching, phone number normalisation, address comparison, booking pattern analysis
- Confidence scoring: every candidate match carries a score. High-confidence matches merge automatically; borderline ones go to a human review queue
The score matters because a bad merge is worse than no merge. Greeting a guest by the wrong name at check-in, or showing the dietary notes of a different guest, does real damage. Resolution without scoring is a liability.
Not the same as a CRM
A CRM stores and acts on guest data. Identity resolution decides which records refer to the same person before any of that happens. Import a set of guest records into a CRM and it stores what it was given, duplicates included; resolution is the step that collapses those duplicates into one record first. The two are complementary: resolution sits below the CRM and feeds it clean data.
The full guide covers the worked example, the OTA masked email problem, deterministic and probabilistic matching, survivorship rules, and what to ask a vendor.
Read: guest identity resolution for hotel groupsThe resolved record that work produces is a hotel master profile: one person, sitting above the systems that feed it, not a guest profile inside one PMS.
Read: what a hotel master profile isExplore the platform
Casa Layer builds guest identity resolution for hotels: connections to the systems you already run, scoped by credentials you issue, probabilistic matching with confidence scoring, and one Master Profile independent of them all, served through an open REST API and an MCP server to your team, your CRM and any agent.