Mossos d'Esquadra Guest Registry: Reporting in Catalonia (2026)

Royal Decree 933/2021 is state law and SES.HOSPEDAJES is a Ministry of the Interior portal, so it is easy to take for granted that this is the only possible circuit for the guest report.

In Catalonia it is not, and the reason predates the decree: the Generalitat has its own police force with full public-safety competencies, and it built its guest-reporting channel in 2010, eleven years before RD 933/2021. That channel still runs and is still the one that applies.

Anyone managing a flat in Barcelona and another in Madrid ends up running two complete processes: two registrations, two sets of credentials, two forms with different fields, and the same figure of 24 hours counted in two different ways.

Why Catalonia does not use SES.HOSPEDAJES

The obligation to report the details of anyone who stays to the authorities is older than Royal Decree 933/2021. It arises from public safety, and the state order that governed it before the decree left the regional competencies expressly intact:

“The provisions of this Order shall be without prejudice to the competencies recognised in this matter to the Autonomous Communities holding competencies for the protection of persons and property and for the maintenance of public safety.”

Catalonia is one of those communities. Its Statute of Autonomy grants the Mossos d’Esquadra “all the functions proper to a police force” across the whole Catalan territory. Among those areas it lists public safety and “administrative policing, which includes that deriving from state legislation”.² Collecting and reporting the details of anyone who stays is administrative policing.

On top of that reservation, the Generalitat issued Orden IRP/418/2010, which requires reports to its own Dirección General de la Policía and not to the Ministry of the Interior. The substantive obligation does not change: you collect the guest’s data and report it to the authorities. What changes is to whom you report and through which channel. No rule says in those words that reporting to the Mossos exempts you from the state one, but public-safety competence is regional and the state order applies without prejudice to it, so our reading is that reporting to the regional force satisfies the duty rather than adding to SES.HOSPEDAJES.

The rest of the regional map comes down to three cases:

• Catalonia: you report to the Mossos d’Esquadra instead of to SES.HOSPEDAJES.
• País Vasco (Basque Country): you report to the Ertzaintza through its own system, again instead of the state one.
• Rest of Spain: you report to SES.HOSPEDAJES, and Galicia adds a regional channel on top.

Each case, with its rule and its procedure, is in guest registration in Catalonia and the País Vasco (Basque Country).

What the Mossos’ registre de viatgers is

The registre de viatgers (guest registry, in Catalan) is the procedure by which accommodation establishments located in Catalonia report the details of the people who stay with them. The recipient is the Generalitat’s Dirección General de la Policía, the directorate the Mossos d’Esquadra belong to.³

The Order does not define who is covered by the name over the door but by the activity: any establishment that, whatever it calls itself, has as its main or complementary purpose the provision of accommodation to people for a price, professionally or habitually. The rule names hotels, rural tourism, campsites, apartments and tourist-use establishments in general.³ A tourist-use dwelling comes in through that door.

The only express exclusion is facilities registered in the Catalan Network of Youth Facilities when they host organised activities for under-18s under the control of the group’s supervisors.³

That channel, on our reading, does not add to the state one: it replaces it.

• If the property is in Catalonia, you report to the Mossos d’Esquadra and not to SES.HOSPEDAJES.
• If it is in a community without its own system, you report to SES.HOSPEDAJES.
• Each stay then has a single recipient, with no double submission to make.

SES.HOSPEDAJES and Mossos d’Esquadra: the differences

The two columns share nothing operationally: not the recipient, not the credentials, not the list of fields, not even the way the deadline is counted. The territory row reflects our reading of the rules, not an exemption written into any of them.

What data the hoja de viajeros collects

Orden IRP/418/2010 separates two obligations worth keeping apart: one stays at home and the other travels.

The documentary register stays at the establishment. Every person who stays must be registered, with no age threshold, filling in at least the mandatory fields of the annex 1 model, which the Order titles “Registro de personas alojadas”. Each stay carries its own record number and the numbers must run consecutively.⁴ That information must be kept for three years at the disposal of the Mossos d’Esquadra, who can require it to be produced. The establishment is also answerable for the data matching the document the guest showed.⁵

What you report to the Dirección General de la Policía is the shorter annex 2 list⁶:

• For the establishment: CIF/NIF, name, address, municipality and province.
• For the person staying: document number and type, date of issue of the document, first name, surnames, sex, date of birth, nationality and date of arrival at the establishment.

Dates go in YYYYMMDD format. The date of birth has a way out for the awkward case: the year is mandatory and, if the month and day are unknown, they are entered as 0000.⁴

The accepted documents are not those of the state circuit either, and the form asks for the type as a single letter⁴:

• D (DNI) and C (driving licence): for Spaniards only.
• P (passport): for Spaniards and for foreigners.
• I (identity card or document): for citizens of the European Union, Andorra, Iceland, Switzerland, Norway, Malta, Monaco and San Marino.
• N (valid Spanish residence permit) and X (residence permit issued by another European Union member state).

Two absences surprise anyone arriving from SES.HOSPEDAJES. Annex 2 asks for no contact details: the address and phone number sit in annex 1, and there they are optional, as are the guest’s signature and the expected number of nights.⁴ Nor is the departure date reported, only the arrival date, so the Catalan system never records when anyone leaves.

For minors there is no age threshold in Catalonia: article 2 requires every person who stays to be registered.⁵ The difference from the state circuit lies in the signature and in the family relationship.

RD 933/2021 requires the report to be signed by every person over fourteen and, for those under that age, the data to be supplied by the adult accompanying them. Its annex I also asks for the family relationship between travellers when one of them is a minor.⁷ Neither Catalan annex carries that field.⁴ The state rules, with their edge cases, are in minors in the guest registry.

Deadlines: when to report to the registre de viatgers

The deadline is set by article 6 of Orden IRP/418/2010 and it leaves no room for interpretation:

“The information contained in annex 2 must be reported through the systems provided for in this Order within the period of twenty-four hours following the start of each person’s stay.”

Two practical consequences follow. The clock runs per person, so a group arriving in two waves generates two separate deadlines. And it starts at the start of the stay, not at the booking: a January booking for an August stay triggers nothing until August.

The figure matches the state one; the way it is counted does not. RD 933/2021 requires reporting immediately and, in any event, within no more than 24 hours from two distinct moments: the booking or the signing of the contract (its cancellation too) and the start of the contracted services.⁷ In Catalonia only the second one counts, so the practice that satisfies both territories is the same: report at check-in.

Reporting the stay days later is already a late report, and that conduct is classified as a minor offence.

How to access the registre de viatgers

Reporting is done electronically, through the Mossos d’Esquadra website, under the option article 3 of the Order calls “Servicio y Registro de viajeros de establecimientos de hospedaje”. Getting into the application requires a username and password, and the instructions for obtaining them are on that same website.³ Submitting the form requires identification with idCAT Mòbil or a digital certificate (individual, legal entity or linked person). There is no fee for the procedure.⁹

Three things change compared with SES.HOSPEDAJES:

1. Credentials are not inherited. Your host code and your SES.HOSPEDAJES user do not open the Catalan application: these are two registrations with two different administrations.³
2. There is an acknowledgement, and it is worth keeping. The Dirección General de la Policía records receipt with the corresponding acknowledgement, which arrives as an electronic notification.⁹ It is your proof that you reported on time.
3. The penalty regime is state-level, but the Generalitat is who fines you. Penalties are imposed by the authorities of the autonomous community within their public-safety competencies, applying the Ley Orgánica 4/2015 de protección de la seguridad ciudadana (Public Safety Act).¹⁰

That Act provides for two offences that can reach you, with their amounts¹⁰:

• Minor (article 37.9): irregularities in filling in the register and mandatory reports filed late. Fine of 100 to 600 euros.
• Serious (article 36.20): absence of the register or omission of the mandatory reports. Fine of 601 to 30,000 euros.

The bands within the serious fine and the grading criteria are in penalties for breaching RD 933/2021.

On paper a non-electronic route remains: article 4 reserves it for cases where, for duly justified special reasons, you cannot use electronic means. You then hand in two copies of the document carrying the annex 2 information at Mossos premises, in person or by post, or fax it to the relevant police station.¹¹

The Generalitat’s procedure page is blunter than the Order: the procedure can only be done online, and anything arriving through another channel is not taken into account and does not count towards the filing date.⁹ It is not a channel you can pick for convenience.

The registre de viatgers is not the same as the tourist licence

These are two obligations with different foundations, different rules and different files:

• The registre de viatgers is the public-safety obligation: reporting who stays. Orden IRP/418/2010 imposes it and the Ley Orgánica 4/2015 penalises it.
• The tourist licence or authorisation is the permission to operate as accommodation. Each community’s tourism legislation governs it and the community itself penalises it, with its own proceedings and its own amounts. What happens when it is missing is in renting without a tourist licence, and the requirement region by region in the tourist licence by region.

The Order sets its scope by the activity, not by the administrative title: it binds anyone who provides accommodation for a price professionally or habitually, licence or no licence.³ Complying with one obligation does not exempt you from the other. How the three pieces fit together (authorisation, registration and guest reporting) is laid out in licence, registry and guest report: the three obligations.

If you manage properties inside and outside Catalonia

This is the case for many agencies: one apartment in Barcelona, another in Madrid, another in Valencia. In practice, two procedures coexist:

• Barcelona (Catalonia): report to the Mossos d’Esquadra registre de viatgers.
• Madrid, Valencia and the rest of Spain without its own system: report to SES.HOSPEDAJES.

What decides where each stay goes is the physical location of the property, not the platform the booking came through. If an OTA simply marks the accommodation as “Spain”, it does not matter: a property in Catalonia reports to the Mossos; a property outside, to SES.

Two clocks coexist in the same team as well: outside Catalonia the deadline can start at the booking, in Catalonia only at check-in. A single procedure for the whole portfolio ends up filing late on one side or asking for more data than is needed on the other.

What RegistroViajero covers today (and what it does not)

Today RegistroViajero submits guest reports only to SES.HOSPEDAJES (Ministry of the Interior). We do not report to the Mossos d’Esquadra registre de viatgers. Catalonia is in development, with no committed public date.

What this means in practice:

• If all your properties are in SES.HOSPEDAJES territory (Madrid, Andalusia, Comunidad Valenciana, Galicia, Castilla y León, etc.), RegistroViajero automates your guest report end to end.
• If you have a property in Catalonia, that property falls outside: the stay is reported to the registre de viatgers with the Generalitat’s credentials, through the Generalitat’s procedure.
• Covering all of Spain means three integrations, not one: SES.HOSPEDAJES, the Mossos’ registre de viatgers and the Ertzaintza system in the País Vasco (Basque Country).

Next steps, depending on where your properties are

• If you operate outside Catalonia and the País Vasco (Basque Country), RegistroViajero automates the submission of the report to SES.HOSPEDAJES. The state rule, field by field, is in what RD 933/2021 requires.
• If your portfolio mixes Catalonia with other communities, the split by territory is in guest registration in Catalonia and the País Vasco (Basque Country).

This article is informational and does not replace legal advice. The Mossos d’Esquadra registre de viatgers procedure, the required fields and the deadlines may change. Always check the information on the Generalitat de Catalunya electronic office and on the official Mossos d’Esquadra portal.