If you rent accommodation in Portugal — a hotel, a guesthouse or an alojamento local apartment — every foreign guest, including citizens of other EU countries, has to be reported through the SIBA portal within three working days of arrival, and again when they leave. Portuguese nationals are not reported. The obligation comes from article 16 of Law 23/2007, and since the former immigration service (SEF) was dissolved in 2023 the system sits with AIMA and the police forces.
This guide covers who must report, which data the boletim de alojamento needs, the deadline and fines, and how to capture the data from a passport without typing it.
Who must report, and whom
- Who: anyone providing paid accommodation — hotels, local accommodation (alojamento local), rural tourism and private rentals.
- Whom: every foreign guest, whatever their age, including EU and Schengen citizens. Portuguese citizens are excluded.
- When: within three working days of the guest's arrival, and within three working days of their departure.
- How: one boletim de alojamento per guest, submitted electronically through SIBA (Sistema de Informação de Boletins de Alojamento), with the establishment registered beforehand.
What the boletim asks for
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The form collects the guest's identity and stay data:
| Data | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| First name and surname | ID card or passport |
| Nationality | ID card or passport (and the MRZ) |
| Date and place of birth | ID card or passport |
| Type, number and issuing country of the identity document | ID card or passport |
| Country and place of residence | Ask the guest — it is not on most documents |
| Date of entry and expected exit | Your booking |
Most of it is on the document. The part that causes errors is copying it by hand: a passport number with a letter O read as a zero, or a date of birth written in the wrong order, is exactly the kind of mistake that makes a record useless.
Fines
According to the official SIBA FAQ, missing boletins are fined between €100 and €2,000, assessed in relation to the number of infringements — so exposure grows with volume. A busy month with no reports filed is structurally worse than a quiet one. For the comparison with Spain and Italy, see what the penalty regime actually says. This article is not legal advice.
Capturing passport data without typing it
The slow step is not SIBA itself; it is getting the fields off the document. Three practical rules:
- 1Capture structured data, not just a photo. A photo still has to be transcribed. Extract the fields at check-in.
- 2Use the MRZ. The two lines at the bottom of a passport carry the name, number, nationality and dates with check digits, so a misread can be detected.
- 3Do not build an archive of ID copies. The law requires the data to be reported, not a photocopy kept forever. Extract, report, and delete the image according to your retention policy.
WhappScan does not submit anything to SIBA. It extracts the fields: send a photo of the passport or ID card — the guest or your cleaner can do it by WhatsApp — and you get name, document number, date of birth, expiry and nationality as text, with the MRZ decoded and its check digits validated, ready to paste into the boletim.
Try it with a sample passport or your own document on the free passport and ID scanner: no signup, up to three documents a day.
For every country side by side, see guest registration in Europe by country.
Sources
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