Automate Spain Guest Registration under RD 933/2021

Royal Decree 933/2021 asks you to collect a long list of guest data and submit it to the Ministry of the Interior through SES.HOSPEDAJES, immediately and within 24 hours at the latest¹.

Doing it by hand is workable for one property and two stays a month. At any real volume, every reservation goes through a manual transcription in front of a validator that rejects the batch over one digit, and a rejection left uncorrected ends in a public-safety penalty. The objection to automating this is always the same: “doing it by hand doesn’t take that long”, which holds as long as arrivals come one at a time.

It stops holding in high season, with four arrivals on the same day and the Ministry portal open at midnight. The work is not hard in itself: it is split across three systems that never talk to each other, the portal where the booking lands, the paper the guest signs, and the Ministry’s form.

The “parte de viajeros” and the “registro” are the same obligation under RD 933/2021: a digital register you keep for three years and a communication that goes out within 24 hours.

The three blocks of guest registration you can automate

Guest registration breaks into three blocks that automate separately:

1. Capture the guest’s data: ID document, date of birth, address, contact, and relationship if a minor is travelling.
2. Get the reservation into your system: accommodation, dates, amount, payment method.
3. File the report with the Ministry: build the submission and store the receipt.

The rule draws no distinction by type of establishment. Tourist apartments fall inside the definition of lodging activity through their own sub-paragraph:

“b) Those carried out by campsites and motorhome parking areas, whatever their ownership or use regime, apartments, bungalows and other similar tourist accommodation.”

Hotels, hostales, pensiones and casas de huéspedes sit in sub-paragraph a) of the same section, so they all owe the report alike. And it goes out electronically: Article 6.4 orders that communications “shall be made by telematic procedures”, with non-professional lodging as the only exception¹.

Automating means, for each block, eliminating manual data entry without losing the human validation the law explicitly requires: the signature on the truthfulness declaration, the check of the document when the guest arrives, and the decision on incidents.

The manual guest registration flow, step by step

With no tooling, every reservation takes this route:

1. The guest books through Booking, Airbnb, or by phone.
2. You write the reservation down in a spreadsheet or notebook.
3. On check-in day, you ask for their ID and have them sign a paper.
4. That night you log into SES.HOSPEDAJES and fill every field by hand.
5. You mistype a letter, the submission is rejected, and you start over.
6. You file paperwork that has to be kept for 3 years³.

The real work sits in step 4: typing by hand what is already written in two other places, at exactly the point where the Ministry validates field by field.

1. Data capture: the guest fills the check-in on their phone

This is the block that saves the most time. Instead of filling the form for them, you send the guest a unique check-in link, which they complete from their phone before arrival, in their own language.

• They pick their document type (DNI, NIE, passport) and the form shows only the fields that document requires.
• They type their Annex I data with validation in the field itself: support-number format, DNI check letter, coherent dates.
• They sign the truthfulness declaration on screen, the act Article 4.2 requires of every person over fourteen⁴.

By the time they reach the property, the data is in your dashboard, checked against the rules SES.HOSPEDAJES applies when it receives the report.

None of this goes through a photo of the document. Many check-in forms ask for an image of the DNI and read it with OCR. RegistroViajero does not ask for one: RD 933/2021 requires the Annex I data, not images of the document⁵, and the AEPD expressly prohibits keeping copies of a guest’s DNI⁶. The rest of the argument is in the comparison of online check-in apps and in why photocopying the DNI is prohibited.

The form has to be built for RD 933/2021: a generic check-in leaves out fields the report requires, and then the submission to the Ministry fails. Those fields are all of Annex I, including the second surname and the support number for Spanish DNI and NIE, and the relationship whenever a minor is travelling⁵.

For groups and families (the trickiest case), two patterns work well together:

• One link per traveler: each adult fills in their own from their phone.
• One group link: the lead guest completes them all in one session, marking the relationships.

The second pattern is the one you need for registering minors, where you also need the accompanying adult’s details.

2. Automatic reservation import: iCal

The second big block: getting reservations in on their own. The industry-standard route is the iCal feed each portal exposes.

Connect the iCal URLs from Booking.com, Airbnb, VRBO, Expedia, Tripadvisor, Google Calendar, Holidu, and Rentalia, and every new booking shows up in your dashboard with its dates, its status, and its reservation ID. The sync runs every 15 minutes.

What iCal doesn’t bring:

• The lead guest’s name in many cases: plenty of portals leave it out for privacy.
• The guest’s ID document, which portals don’t share.
• Data for the other travelers accompanying the lead guest.
• The signature on the truthfulness declaration.

Those four gaps are precisely what the report requires, so iCal import doesn’t replace digital check-in: it complements it. The reservation arrives on its own and the guest completes their part from their phone. Setting up each portal, feed by feed, is covered in Sync Booking, Airbnb, VRBO and others via iCal.

3. Send guest data to SES.HOSPEDAJES automatically

The final step, the most intimidating one, is also the one that benefits most from automation, because it is the only one on a clock. Article 6.3 sets two moments and gives 24 hours for each:

“This communication shall be made immediately, and in any case within a period not exceeding 24 hours, respectively, from the following moments: a) On making the reservation or formalising the contract or, where applicable, its cancellation. b) On the commencement of the contracted services.”

Two clocks of 24 hours each, not one: the first starts when the booking is made or cancelled, the second when the guest checks in.

SES.HOSPEDAJES exposes a web service, so an integrated system submits the communications without going through the web form. You mark the reservation as validated, click “submit”, and the system:

1. Builds the XML with the reservation and traveler data.
2. Sends it to SES.HOSPEDAJES authenticated with your Ministry credentials.
3. Stores the receipt in the audit log.
4. If the Ministry returns a validation error, surfaces its message.

For this integration you need three credentials issued by the Ministry: username, password, and lessor code. Without them no submission is possible. The procedure, step by step, is in how to obtain your SES.HOSPEDAJES credentials.

Which steps of guest registration can’t be automated

Having software submit on your behalf is legal, and the Ministry says so plainly:

“The communication of the data may be made through a third party provided that the third party is authorised by the obligated subject by one of the forms admitted in law to act on behalf of another person.”

What cannot be delegated is the responsibility. Article 4.3 makes the establishment “responsible for the accuracy of the data recorded” in the partes, “so that they match the documents or systems that certify the identity of the persons”⁴. Which is why four things stay under human control even when the tool makes them easy:

• The signature on the truthfulness declaration. It can be digital, on screen, but it still has to be a conscious act by the guest.
• The check of the document in hand. You compare the physical document with what they typed and correct it before submitting. The tool flags the incident; the call is yours.
• The initial setup of the accommodation. The Ministry assigns the establishment code, and you enter it by hand once.
• Ministry incidents. Rejections, missing data, doubts about how to classify a traveler: the system flags them and you decide.

Automating the submission of a report you have already validated is one thing. Submitting without looking is another, and Article 4.3 does not move the responsibility anywhere: the accommodation owner answers for the accuracy regardless.

From booking to receipt: the full automated flow

Chaining the three blocks, here’s day-to-day with a system that automates RD 933/2021:

1. The guest books on Booking, Airbnb, etc.
2. The reservation lands on its own via iCal.
3. The system sends a check-in link to the guest.
4. The guest fills in their Annex I data from their phone and signs the truthfulness declaration.
5. They arrive and you compare their document with the data they typed.
6. One click submits the report to SES.HOSPEDAJES and you get the receipt back.
7. The data is kept for 3 years and deleted afterwards³.

Step 2 is not instant, and the delay comes from the portal rather than from your system. The sync polls every 15 minutes, but Airbnb publishes changes with a typical delay of 2 to 4 hours and Booking between 30 minutes and 2 hours. With the 24 hours of Article 6.3 counting from the guest’s arrival, the margin stays comfortable.

Where the work goes, before and after:

Seven requirements for guest registration software

If you’re evaluating options to automate RD 933/2021, the non-negotiables are:

• Direct submission to SES.HOSPEDAJES, not a file export you upload manually.
• Full coverage of the Annex I fields the report requires, including relationships for minors.
• iCal import from the portals you use, at least Booking and Airbnb.
• Multi-language check-in: a Spanish-only form multiplies abandonment with international guests.
• Immutable audit log and 3-year retention.
• GDPR compliance: encrypted data and EEA-based hosting.
• A check-in that does not lock if your subscription lapses. Your guests must still be able to complete it.

RegistroViajero ticks all seven: guest check-in in 9 languages, submission to SES.HOSPEDAJES with the receipt stored, 15 days free without a credit card, and €5 per active accommodation per month with no minimum. Prices and features side by side are in the Chekin comparison and in the comparison of guest registration apps.

Connecting your PMS or channel manager to SES.HOSPEDAJES

If you already use a PMS or a channel manager, the sensible setup is for it to receive the reservations and pass guest data to the compliance tool without your touching anything. Done by API integration or shared iCal.

The PMS doesn’t replace the Ministry submission: it feeds it. The guest signature and the communication to SES.HOSPEDAJES still happen inside the compliance tool, which is where your credentials live.

Is automating worth it for a single property?

Yes, for two reasons.

Potential penalty against cost. RD 933/2021 grades non-compliance at two levels⁸ and Organic Law 4/2015 prices them⁹:

The €30,000 is the ceiling of the bracket, not the opening figure. Article 33.2 of Organic Law 4/2015 splits the serious bracket into three degrees and requires an offence to be fined at the minimum degree, which for serious infractions runs from €601 to €10,400 (Article 39.1.b). Climbing to the medium degree requires proving one of four closed circumstances, and the only realistic one for a paperwork breach is recidivism: more than one offence of the same nature within two years, declared by a final administrative decision. The fine is imposed by the Government Delegate in your autonomous community, competent for serious and minor infractions under Article 32.1.c), not by the Ministry of the Interior⁹.

Filing late is the milder of the two and costs between €100 and €600. RegistroViajero costs €5 per active accommodation per month with no minimum, so the math works out fast.

Time recovered. Even with 5 bookings a month, that’s 5 manual submissions of around 10 minutes each: almost an hour a month back.

What to read before you build the flow

• If the Ministry portal is the unclear part, start with the SES.HOSPEDAJES guide.
• If the doubt is what the rule asks for, start with what RD 933/2021 requires.
• If you handle families or groups, the minors case is worth reading before you configure the flow.

Want to see the system in action? See how RegistroViajero works.

This article is for informational purposes. It does not replace professional legal advice. The final grading of an infraction and the amount of the fine are for the competent authority to determine in each case.