Non-EU Guests: Passport, NIE and Which Field Goes Where in SES.Hospedajes

Non-EU Guests: Passport, NIE and Which Field Goes Where in SES.Hospedajes

The single decision that breaks most traveller reports is not the passport number. It is the document type you select. That one dropdown decides whether two further fields — *segundo apellido* and *número de soporte* — become mandatory or must be left blank. Pick `NIE` for a guest who is standing in front of you with a Brazilian passport, and the platform will demand a support number that does not exist on that document. Pick `PAS` for a resident whose Spanish TIE is the document you actually photocopied, and your record no longer matches the ID you are legally required to keep for three years.

Here is the number that should decide how much care you put into this: partial omission of data, errors in the guest data or sending it late are all classified as *infracciones leves* under Real Decreto 933/2021, penalised through Chapter V of Ley Orgánica 4/2015 — the range for minor infringements is 100 to 600 euros, per incident, and the deadline is 24 hours from check-in. A field mismatch is not a cosmetic problem.

And here is the second thing nobody tells you up front: a passport, scanned perfectly, gives you roughly six of the traveller fields the annex requires. The rest — home address, phone, email, relationship to a minor — are not printed on any travel document. If you plan your check-in around "we'll scan the passport at the door", you have already designed a process that fails half the form.

The five document codes, and when each one applies

SES.Hospedajes works from a closed list. For each guest, exactly one applies:

• Spanish DNI → type `NIF`. Support number required. Second surname required.
• TIE (foreigner's ID card issued in Spain) → type `NIE`. Support number required. Second surname required if the card shows one.
• EU registration certificate (the green paper or green card) → type `NIE`, support number required — but see the warning below.
• Any passport, any nationality → type `PAS`. No support number. No second surname.
• Any other national ID document (an Italian, French or German ID card, for example) → type `OTRO`. No support number.

The practical rule for a non-EU guest: if they live abroad, it is `PAS`. If they live in Spain, it is almost always `NIE` with their TIE. The passport of a Spanish resident is a valid travel document but it is not the document that proves their status here, and if the police cross-check your record against their residence file, the TIE is what matches.

Field by field: a non-EU guest arriving with a passport

This is the most common case in a holiday rental. Fill it like this:

• Nombre — the given names exactly as printed, not the shortened version they introduce themselves with.
• Primer apellido — the surname as printed on the passport.
• Segundo apellido — leave blank. Most non-Spanish documents carry one surname field; inventing a split creates a mismatch.
• Tipo de documento — `PAS`.
• Número de documento — the passport number, letters included, no spaces.
• Número de soporte — leave blank. It does not exist on a passport and the report is valid without it.
• Nacionalidad — the country of issue as shown on the document.
• Fecha de nacimiento and sexo — both printed on the data page.
• Dirección de residencia habitual, país, teléfono, correo electrónico — none of these are on the passport. Ask for them.
• Relación de parentesco — required when one of the travellers in the party is a minor. The annex of RD 933/2021 asks for the relationship between travellers when any of them is under age; children under 14 do not sign the entry form themselves, the accompanying adult supplies their data.

The guest who says "I have a NIE"

This is where reports go wrong most often, because "NIE" means three different things in everyday speech.

The NIE is a number, not a document. The document that carries it is the TIE, a card. What you type into *número de documento* is the NIE itself: letter, seven digits, letter (X, Y or Z at the start for most). What you type into *número de soporte* is a different string entirely: the letter E followed by 8 digits, padded with leading zeros if the printed number is shorter — for example `E00654321`. It identifies the physical card, not the person, so it changes every time the card is renewed.

Two traps follow from that:

• A guest who renewed their TIE last month has the same NIE and a new support number. If you reuse a record from their previous stay, the support number is now wrong.
• The old green A4 certificate is not an identity card and carries no photo. Some hosts register it as the guest's document; the safer practice is to register the ID document that actually identifies the person — their national ID card or passport — and keep the certificate as supporting evidence only.

EU guests are not a NIE case

A French guest with a national ID card is `OTRO`, not `NIE`. An Italian guest with a passport is `PAS`. EU citizenship does not create a Spanish document. The only time an EU national goes in as `NIE` is when they are registered as a resident here and you are using that registration document.

What a passport scan actually gives you

Every modern passport carries a machine-readable zone at the bottom of the data page. In the TD3 format used by passports it is two lines of 44 characters, defined by ICAO Doc 9303, and it encodes: document type, issuing state, name, document number, nationality, date of birth, sex and expiry date, each with a check digit.

That is the good news — those fields are readable with near-perfect reliability, far more so than the visual zone, because the alphabet is restricted to capitals, digits and the filler `<`.

The bad news is structural, not technical:

• The MRZ has no address, no phone, no email. Three mandatory fields, zero of them on the document.
• The name field is truncated when it is too long for the available characters. A guest whose full legal name runs long will appear cut off in the MRZ while the printed zone shows it in full — always take the name from the printed data page and use the MRZ to confirm.
• Nationality is a three-letter code (`DEU`, `MAR`, `USA`), not a country name, so it needs mapping before it goes into the form.

The design conclusion: collect address, phone and email at booking, in writing, and use the document only for identity fields. If you are chasing them at the door with a queue behind you, the 24-hour clock is already running.

Five errors and what each one actually costs

1. Support number typed into the document field (or vice versa). The record is rejected or, worse, accepted with a nonsensical ID. Counts as an error in the guest data.
2. Support number entered without leading zeros. `E654321` instead of `E00654321`. Same category.
3. Passport registered for a Spanish resident who holds a TIE. Not automatically an infraction, but your paper record and your electronic record no longer agree — and you must keep both for three years from the end of the service.
4. Second surname invented for a foreign guest. Splitting "Van der Berg" into two fields to fill a box creates a name that matches no document.
5. Sent after 24 hours because someone was waiting for the guest's email address. Explicitly a minor infringement.

The checklist of what the law actually asks for, in full, is set out in Guest Check-In: Exactly Which ID Fields the Law Requires You to Collect, and the platform-level walkthrough is in Traveler Registration in SES.Hospedajes: The 2026 Guide for Vacation Rentals.

A check-in procedure that survives a busy Saturday

1. At booking, collect address, country of residence, phone and email in the reservation form. These are the four fields no scan will ever produce.
2. Before arrival, ask each guest over 14 to send a photo of the document they will travel with, and ask one question with it: *do you live in Spain?* That single question routes them to `PAS` or `NIE`.
3. On arrival, verify the person against the photo and check the expiry date.
4. Within 24 hours, transmit. Do not batch a Saturday's arrivals into Monday.
5. Retention: keep the register for three years from the end of the service — and no longer than you need the image files themselves. On what you may and may not store, see How to Store Client ID Copies Without Breaking GDPR; the Spanish data protection authority has taken a restrictive view of routinely retaining photographs of identity documents.

Step 2 is the one worth automating. A guest who has just landed will send a WhatsApp photo without being asked twice; asking them to install anything is how you end up typing the passport yourself at midnight. The mechanics of turning that photo into filled fields are covered in Register Guests in SES.Hospedajes by Scanning Their ID Over WhatsApp.

Once the document type is right, everything downstream — which fields appear, which stay blank, whether the report is accepted — follows automatically. Get the dropdown right and the rest is typing.

Want to see what a passport or TIE photo actually turns into? Try it free — no signup.