Anyone running accommodation in Italy — a hotel, a B&B, a guesthouse or a short-let apartment — must report the identity details of every guest, Italians included, to the police through the Alloggiati Web portal. The deadline is within 24 hours of arrival, and for stays of no more than 24 hours the report is made on arrival. The obligation comes from article 109 of the TULPS and the ministerial decree of 7 January 2013.
This guide covers who reports, which fields the schedina needs, how it is sent, what the Interior Ministry says about identifying guests, and how to cut the time spent retyping documents.
Who reports, and for whom
- Who: the manager of the property, whatever its size, and even when the activity is not a business or the booking came through an online platform. The responsibility stays with them.
- For whom: every person staying, not only foreign nationals. That is the main difference with Portugal, France or Germany, where only foreign guests are reported.
- Where: exclusively through the Servizio Alloggiati (alloggiatiweb.poliziadistato.it), with credentials issued by the local police headquarters (Questura).
Deadlines
Want to see exactly which fields come off an ID card or passport? Upload one here and check it in seconds. No account, no card.
Drag your document or click to upload
PDF or image · max 2 pages
Free trial of up to 2 pages per document.
| Situation | Deadline |
|---|---|
| Ordinary stay | Within 24 hours of arrival |
| Stay of no more than 24 hours | On arrival |
What the schedina contains
According to the official manual, each guest record holds:
| Field | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Guest type (single guest, head of family, group leader, family member, group member) | Your booking |
| Arrival date and length of stay | Your booking |
| Surname and first name | ID document |
| Sex | Document (and the MRZ) |
| Date of birth | Document |
| Municipality or country of birth | Document |
| Citizenship | Document (and the MRZ) |
| Type, number and place of issue of the document | Document |
Records can be typed into the portal, uploaded as a fixed-width text file following the police's record layout, or sent by property-management software. Either way the fields are read off the document — which is where the time goes and where the errors appear.
A photo of the document is not identification
The Interior Ministry circular prot. no. 38138 of 18 November 2024 made clear that remote-only identification — the guest uploads a document to an app and receives a key-box code — does not satisfy article 109. Someone has to see who is entering the property.
Worth remembering when choosing check-in software: no tool replaces identifying the person. What a tool can remove is the mechanical part, copying the document's data into the record.
Penalties
Failing to report is a criminal contravention under article 17 of the TULPS: up to three months' arrest or a fine of up to €206. The unit is the individual guest record, not the period. The comparison with Spain and Portugal, with worked numbers, is in what the penalty regime actually says. This article is not legal advice — check with your Questura.
Cutting the time per check-in
- 1Photograph the document during the in-person check, which has to happen anyway.
- 2Extract the fields as text instead of transcribing them. On passports and most ID cards the MRZ carries surname, first name, sex, date of birth, citizenship and document number with check digits, so a misread shows up immediately.
- 3Paste into the schedina or the upload file, then delete the image: the law asks for the data to be reported, not for an archive of photocopies.
WhappScan handles step 2. It does not send anything to Alloggiati Web and does not replace in-person identification: it reads the photo of the document — sent over WhatsApp by your cleaner or receptionist if that suits you — and returns name, document number, date of birth, expiry and citizenship as text, with the MRZ decoded and its check digits validated.
Try it on your own document: the free passport and ID scanner needs no signup and handles up to three documents a day.
For the other countries side by side, see guest registration in Europe by country.
Sources
Need to extract data from a document right now?
Try it free in seconds — no account, no card. Upload an invoice or document and get the data instantly.
Try it free