to register and verify a customer’s identity
from concept to production-ready
The challenge
Sidehide is on a mission to create a one-click hotel experience. Consumers can book, arrive, and check-in, all through the Sidehide app, providing a seamless and secure experience from booking to check-in. In order to build this, Sidehide identified three challenges to overcome: local regulations, fraud, and user experience.
The hotel booking process today involves manual, slow processes. Sidehide founders Joakim and Fredrik saw this first hand. When arriving at a hotel, they’d hand over their passport to front-desk staff, who then go into another room and scan documents. This was followed by a long wait before they could go to their rooms. Although driven by regulatory demands, this manual approach invites fraud — hotel staff might not be trusted with PII, and fraudsters might stay at hotels with counterfeit documents.
The Sidehide team set out to take this process online, creating a hotel booking and check-in experience that’s seamless and secure for both hotels and consumers. For Sidehide, this booking process started with a verified digital identity.
The solution
Faced with the above challenge, Sidehide identified two key criteria they wanted in a digital identity partner: a brand they can trust, and a brand they could scale with as they grew.
From the work Onfido had done with leading challenger banks such as Revolut, Sidehide could see our identity verification in action and knew instantly that it was what they wanted. They integrated Document and Selfie checks into their sign-up flow, enabling their team to confirm that an ID is legitimate and that it is truly owned by the holder.
Joakim Hultin, CEO at Sidehide
The results
With Onfido, Sidehide are confidently navigating the three core challenges of regulation, fraud, and UX.
Onfido’s comprehensive Document coverage, totaling 4,600 supported documents across 195 countries, means that both Sidehide and their partner hotels are confident that their customers’ accounts are anchored in a real, verified identity and not a counterfeit. This reduces the need for manual back-office processes at the hotels during check-in.
And the impact stretches from the business to the user experience, too. Thanks to Onfido’s modular SDK, Sidehide customers can opt in to identity verification at a stage of their choice, from sign-up through to just before they make their first booking on the platform. No matter where verification is triggered, the whole process takes just one minute. Which gives hotels confidence in occupants, while reducing friction for consumers.
Integrating Onfido as the identity provider as choice took only four weeks from concept to production, meaning Sidehide could go to market faster.
What’s next for Sidehide? The team is putting the app through its paces with hotels and consumers today, ahead of a full market launch in the very near future. Follow them as they do so at sidehide.com.
About Sidehide
Sidehide is enabling 'one-click hotels', offering users a seamless booking and check-in experience. When users arrive at the hotel, all they ever will have to do is to show their boarding pass, and they’re all set.
