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. For any real volume, it’s a recipe for missed entries, transcription errors, and eventually 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, because 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. Below you’ll see how each block chains into the next, which credentials to request first, and where it pays to stop.

What automating guest registration for SES.HOSPEDAJES actually means

Guest registration has three operational blocks:

1. Capture the guest’s data (ID document, date of birth, address, contact, relationship if applicable).
2. Create the reservation in your system (accommodation, dates, amount, payment method).
3. Submit the guest report to the Ministry. The rule draws no distinction by type of establishment: article 2 puts hotels, hostales, pensiones, casas de huéspedes and tourist apartments inside the same definition of lodging activity, so they all owe the report alike².

Automating means, for each of those three, 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. The decision on incidents.

The manual guest registration flow, step by step

Familiar to anyone who’s lived it:

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. You start over.
6. You file paperwork that has to be kept for 3 years³.

Every step is time, error risk, and legal exposure.

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

This is the block that saves the most time. Instead of the guest arriving and you filling the form for them, you send them a unique check-in link. They complete it 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.
• 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. Much of the sector sells DNI scanning with OCR; we don’t offer it, and that is a decision rather than a gap: RD 933/2021 asks for the Annex I data, not images of the document⁴, and the AEPD expressly prohibits keeping copies of a guest’s DNI⁵. We argue it in full 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 won’t do. That means capturing all the fields the rule requires for the guest report, including the second surname and support number for Spanish DNI/NIE and the relationship for minors⁴. A generic form that skips these will fail at the Ministry.

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 especially useful when registering minors, where you also need the accompanying adult’s details.

2. Automatic reservation import: iCal

The second big block. Getting reservations into your system 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. Reservations show up automatically. Every time a portal publishes a new booking, the sync (every 15 minutes) brings it in with the dates, the status, and the reservation ID.

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 (portals don’t share it).
• Data for the other travelers accompanying the lead guest.
• The signature on the truthfulness declaration.

That’s why iCal import doesn’t replace digital check-in. It complements it. The reservation arrives on its own; the guest completes their part from their phone. We go deeper into how to set up each portal 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. SES.HOSPEDAJES exposes an API. An integrated system submits the communications without going through the web form.

If your platform is integrated, marking the reservation as validated and clicking “submit” makes the system:

1. Build the XML with the reservation and traveler data.
2. Sign and submit it to SES.HOSPEDAJES.
3. Receive the receipt and store it in the audit log.
4. If a validation error comes back, surface it with the Ministry’s message so you can fix it.

For this integration you need three credentials issued by the Ministry: username, password, and lessor code. Without them no submission is possible. Getting them isn’t trivial the first time. We explain the procedure step by step in How to obtain your SES.HOSPEDAJES credentials.

Which steps of guest registration can’t be automated

Four things must stay under human control even if the tool makes them easy:

1. The signature on the truthfulness declaration. The law asks the guest to declare under their responsibility that the data is correct. The signature can be digital, on screen. It still has to be a conscious act.
2. The check of the document in hand. When the guest arrives, you compare their physical document with what they typed into the check-in. If the name, the number or the date doesn’t match, you correct it before submitting. A good tool will flag incidents. The call to validate is yours.
3. The initial setup of the accommodation. Each property has an establishment code the Ministry assigns. You enter it once when you configure the property.
4. Handling Ministry incidents (rejections, missing data, doubts about how to classify a traveler). The system flags them; you decide how to resolve them.

Pretending that the system “submits everything without you looking” is, beyond irresponsible, illegal. The accommodation owner is always responsible for the truthfulness of the data submitted.

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. The system polls every 15 minutes, but the portal sets the clock: Airbnb publishes changes with a typical delay of 2 to 4 hours and Booking between 30 minutes and 2 hours.
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. No photo of the document is uploaded.
5. They arrive. You compare their document with the data they typed.
6. One click submits the report to SES.HOSPEDAJES. You get the receipt back.
7. The data is kept for 3 years automatically and deleted afterwards³.

Total manual work per reservation: 30-60 seconds (the validation). Compared to the 10-15 minutes of the manual flow, the difference is visible in the first week.

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 fields RD 933/2021 requires in the guest report, 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 as the rule requires.
• GDPR compliant, encrypted data, EEA-based hosting.
• That it does not block guest check-in if your subscription lapses, so guests can still complete their part during any administrative hiccup on your side.

RegistroViajero ticks all seven. Try it for 15 days without a credit card. The full flow can be set up in an afternoon. If you’re weighing us against the market leader, we wrote an honest Chekin comparison and a 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 signed XML still happen inside the compliance tool.

Is automating worth it for a single property?

Yes, for two reasons:

Potential penalty vs. cost. A single fine starts at €601 (serious tier under Organic Law 4/2015)⁶. The monthly cost of a compliance tool is around €5 per accommodation. 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 for something else.

For higher volumes the calculation isn’t even close.

Next steps

• Not sure how the Ministry portal works? Start with the SES.HOSPEDAJES guide.
• Still unclear on what the rule asks for? Start with what RD 933/2021 requires.
• Missing the last piece (the credentials): we explain how to get them here.
• Handling 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.