Parte de Viajeros, SES.HOSPEDAJES and the Regional Registers: Which One You Actually File

Most of the confusion around guest registration in Spain comes from one thing: four completely different obligations share the same everyday phrase, *"registering guests"*. They have different owners, different deadlines, different penalties, and three of them are not police filings at all. The fastest way to tell them apart is a single question — does this obligation change with each guest, with each property, or with each euro?

Guest-level obligations are police filings (the *parte de viajeros*). Property-level obligations are registers and licence numbers (your regional tourism register, the NRUA from the Ventanilla Única). Money-and-nights obligations are taxes (the regional tourist tax). Getting this wrong is expensive in a specific way: a valid tourism licence and a valid NRUA give you zero protection against the police-filing penalty, because they answer a different question. Under Real Decreto 933/2021, missing records or omitted filings are treated as a serious infringement under Ley Orgánica 4/2015, with fines from 601 to 30,000 euros (BOE).

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The 60-second test

Run each requirement through these three questions, in order:

Does it change every time a new guest arrives? It's a police filing. It goes to SES.HOSPEDAJES, the Mossos d'Esquadra or the Ertzaintza, within 24 hours.
Does it stay the same all year for a given property? It's a register or a number: the regional tourism register (VUT, VFT, VT, ETV… the name changes by region) and the NRUA obtained through the Ventanilla Única Digital de Arrendamientos.
Does it depend on nights sold and money collected? It's a tax: the regional tourist levy, filed on the tax authority's calendar, not the police's.

Anything that doesn't fit those three is almost certainly a platform requirement (Airbnb or Booking asking you to display a number), not a public obligation.

1. The parte de viajeros: the only guest-by-guest filing

This is the obligation created by Real Decreto 933/2021. It applies to anyone whose activity is lodging — hotels, hostels, vacation rentals, rooms — regardless of size or legal form, and it also reaches intermediaries and platforms operating in Spain.

Three numbers are worth memorising, all straight from the decree:

24 hours. Data must be transmitted immediately and in any case within 24 hours of the booking, the contract or the start of the service.
3 years. The digital records must be kept for three years from the end of the service.
601–30,000 €. The fine range for a serious infringement — which is what "no records" and "filing not sent" are classified as. Minor infringements (late or badly filled filings) run from 100 to 600 €.

What you send is not just a name and a document number. Per traveller you're looking at roughly eighteen identity fields — full name and surnames, sex, document type and number, the document support number, nationality, date of birth, full habitual address, landline, mobile, email — plus booking data (dates, number of travellers, property) and payment data. If you want the field-by-field breakdown before you build a form around it, we covered it in exactly which ID fields the law requires you to collect.

The enforcement date matters too: the adaptation period ended on 2 December 2024, so 2026 filings are fully enforceable.

2. Where the parte goes: three destinations, not one

The decree applies across Spain, but the *competent police authority* is not the same everywhere:

Most of Spain: SES.HOSPEDAJES, the Ministry of the Interior platform that replaced the old Hospederías (Guardia Civil) and WebPol/E-Hotel (Policía Nacional) systems.
Catalonia: the Mossos d'Esquadra register.
Basque Country: the Ertzaintza register.

This is the single most common misfiling we see among managers with properties in more than one region. Uploading a Barcelona booking into SES.HOSPEDAJES feels like compliance — you get a confirmation screen — but the filing has not reached the authority that is competent for that address. Operationally: the destination follows the property, not your company's tax address. If you manage flats in Girona and Valencia, you run two channels, permanently.

3. The tourism register and the NRUA: property-level, not guest-level

Your regional tourism registration (the licence or *declaración responsable* that gives your flat its VUT/VFT/VT/ETV code) is a one-off act per property. It authorises the activity. It says nothing about who slept there last night.

Since 2 January 2025 there's a second property-level number: the NRUA, the single rental registration number created by Real Decreto 1312/2024 and issued through the Ventanilla Única Digital de Arrendamientos, managed by the Colegio de Registradores. It became mandatory on 1 July 2025 — without it, you cannot legally advertise a short-term rental on the big platforms (Ministerio de Vivienda).

Both numbers are prerequisites for operating. Neither replaces a single *parte de viajeros*.

4. The tourist tax: a third calendar

Regional tourist levies (Catalonia's IEET, the Balearic ITS and others) are taxes on stays. They depend on nights and rates, they are filed with the regional tax office on its own periodic calendar, and the data you need is not the guest's document support number — it's occupancy. Treat it as accounting, not as check-in.

Do the arithmetic on your own operation

Here is the calculation nobody puts in these guides, because it depends on your numbers rather than on the BOE. Take three inputs you can measure this week:

B — bookings per month.
G — average guests per booking who need a filing.
T — minutes you actually spend per guest: reading the ID photo the guest sent over WhatsApp, typing the fields, fixing the ones the system rejects.

Monthly minutes = B × G × T. A manager with 60 bookings a month, 2.4 filed guests each and 4 measured minutes per guest is spending 576 minutes — roughly 9.6 hours a month, every month, retyping data that already exists in a photo. Multiply by your loaded hourly cost to get the euro figure, then compare it with what an extraction step costs. The point of the exercise is not the number; it's that you have to *measure T yourself*, because T is where the two-region managers get destroyed: the same guest gets typed once into the police channel and again into the PMS or the tax spreadsheet.

What changes on 20 May 2026

Regulation (EU) 2024/1028 on short-term rental data collection and sharing starts applying on 20 May 2026 (EUR-Lex). It harmonises registration across the EU, obliges platforms to verify and display registration numbers, and requires monthly activity reporting through national single digital entry points. It does not touch the *parte de viajeros* — that stays a police matter — but it does mean the property-level numbers stop being a formality: an unverifiable number becomes a delisting risk rather than a paperwork risk.

One capture, four destinations

The workable pattern for a small team is to capture identity data once, at the moment the guest sends a photo of their ID, and then route it. That means:

Guest sends the ID photo over WhatsApp — no app, no portal, no password.
The fields are extracted into a structured row: document type, number, support number, name, surnames, date of birth, nationality, sex.
That row feeds the police filing (SES.HOSPEDAJES, Mossos or Ertzaintza), your PMS and your occupancy sheet, without a second round of typing.

We've written up the practical version of that flow in registering guests in SES.Hospedajes by scanning their ID over WhatsApp, and the full platform walkthrough in the 2026 SES.Hospedajes guide for vacation rentals.

One warning before you build it: an ID photo in a WhatsApp thread is personal data sitting in an uncontrolled place, and the three-year retention rule applies to the *record*, not to the image. Decide up front how long the photos live and who can see them — how to store client ID copies without breaking GDPR covers the retention and access side.

FAQ

See the questions below for the edge cases that come up most: mixed-region portfolios, guests who never send their document, and whether the NRUA covers you.

If you want to see how much of the filing a machine can do for you, upload one ID or booking document and get the fields back as structured data: try it free — no signup.

Frequently asked questions

If I have a tourism licence and an NRUA, do I still have to file the parte de viajeros?

Yes. Those are property-level authorisations; the parte is a guest-level police filing under Real Decreto 933/2021, due within 24 hours of each stay. Omitting it is classified as a serious infringement (601–30,000 €) regardless of how impeccable your licence file is.

I manage properties in Catalonia and in Andalusia. Can I file everything in SES.HOSPEDAJES?

No. The destination follows the property's address. Catalan stays go to the Mossos d'Esquadra register and Basque stays to the Ertzaintza; the rest go to SES.HOSPEDAJES. Running two channels in parallel is the normal state of affairs for a mixed portfolio.

How long do I have to keep the data, and does that include the ID photo?

The decree requires the digital record to be kept for three years from the end of the service. That obligation is about the record, not about keeping a copy of the document image — decide your image retention separately, on GDPR grounds, and delete photos once the fields have been captured and filed.

Does Regulation (EU) 2024/1028 replace the parte de viajeros from May 2026?

No. It applies from 20 May 2026 and works at property level: harmonised registration numbers, platform verification and monthly activity reporting through national single digital entry points. The police filing for each guest is untouched and stays exactly as it is today.