WebPol and e-Hotel: Spain's Old Guest Report Channel

A manager who took over a guesthouse three years ago inherited a folder with two things written by hand: an establishment code and a password for WebPol. Another still has a checkbox in his property software that says “send to e-Hotel” and that nobody has ticked since. And anyone searching today for how police guest registration works finds long guides, with screenshots, of a channel that stopped being one almost two years ago.

What follows is the part that rarely gets told: how that channel worked on the inside, where those credentials came from, what the text file your software generated actually was, and which exact provision now forces you through the Ministry’s platform. If what you want is the story of the platform change and the map of who receives the parte de viajeros depending on the territory, that is told in Hospederías de la Guardia Civil, which was the other half of the same system.

What WebPol and e-Hotel were, and the rule behind them

Start with what can be stated and what cannot. No rule calls them by name: neither Orden INT/1922/2003, nor the resolution that implemented it, nor the note in which Interior announced the new platform uses the words “WebPol” or “e-Hotel”. They are informal names, the two by which the sector knew the National Police’s web channel for guest entry reports, and in practice they have been used interchangeably.

What is written down is the channel. Orden INT/1922/2003 listed four systems for communicating the information on the hoja-registro (the guest registration sheet) to police premises, and they are worth reading in full because they show which era this comes from¹:

Paper. Delivering or posting two copies of the hoja-registro to the Comisaría de Policía or, failing that, to the Guardia Civil post. One copy stayed there and the other came back stamped to the establishment as proof. Post was only accepted in municipalities with no police premises.
Fax to the Comisaría or, in its absence, to the Guardia Civil Comandancia, provided they had suitable receiving equipment. The acknowledgement arrived by fax or by post with a stamped copy.
Magnetic media handed in at the police premises, which returned the medium and a document as proof.
File transmission over the Internet to the Data Processing Centre of the Dirección General de la Policía or of the Guardia Civil. This fourth system is the one that gave rise to WebPol and to Hospederías.

Three details in that section explain much of today’s confusion. The first: the Orden does not split the telematic channel by territory, it only says “as applicable”. What it does split expressly, and in that order of preference, is paper and fax: first the Comisaría de Policía and, failing that, the Guardia Civil.

The second is that none of the four systems exempted anyone from the internal paperwork:

The use of any of the systems indicated does not exempt from the obligation to complete the parte, to have it signed by the guest and to draw up the corresponding libro-registro.

Orden INT/1922/2003, apartado tercero, punto 2¹

And the third is that the channel was not chosen with each filing, it was declared once: establishments had to “propose to the relevant police premises the system” they would use as their usual means of communication¹. Hence so many lodgings have a channel fixed fifteen years ago and no idea how it was ever changed.

Why e-Hotel credentials came from the police station

This is the part most people remember and the one that misleads most today, because the new platform has no equivalent counter. Registration on the telematic channel was not requested online: it was requested through the police premises. The resolution implementing that fourth system set it out, and it narrowed the transmission procedures down to two, the floppy disk and the web:

b) Transmission of the files by connecting to the websites of the Dirección General de la Policía or of the Guardia Civil, as applicable. To use this procedure, a prior application to those Direcciones Generales is required, through the police premises to which the partes de viajeros are currently delivered, and those premises shall determine the access requirements to guarantee security.

Resolución de 14 de julio de 2003, apartado segundo, letra b)²

It pays to read carefully who granted what, because it is almost always told wrong. The comisaría or the post was the intake counter for the application; the ones granting access and setting its security requirements were the Direcciones Generales. The file design itself confirms this for the code: the “hotel establishment code” is a ten-character field that “shall be assigned by the D.G.P. and by the D.G.G.C.”².

The resolution’s other procedure, the one that now sounds like archaeology, was letter a): writing the file to a three-and-a-half-inch floppy disk and handing it in at the police premises, which issued a “received” slip for the establishment’s records².

The text file your property software generated

Many lodgings never saw the e-Hotel screen, and not because they did not use it: because their property software generated the file and uploaded it. That format is set out in the annex to the 2003 resolution, and its rigidity explains why integrating it was a developer’s job²:

8-bit-per-character ASCII code, in txt format, with no compression of any kind and no backup-style dump utilities.
No abbreviations and only characters from the Western alphabet. Alphabetic values in capitals and left-aligned.
Fields separated by the pipe character (|), with the separator mandatory even when the field was empty.
Compound surnames separated by a single blank space, never by special characters.
Records separated by a carriage return and line feed, except the last one.
File name: the ten-byte code of the issuing entity, a full stop and a three-digit sequence that starts at 001, rises one by one to 999 and starts over. The rule’s own example is 28391AAH01.001.

Inside, three record types: type 0 only if the sender was a hotel group, type 1 with the establishment and control data, and one type 2 for each person lodged since the last filing.

Two things from that design survive in the current system. One is the concept: batch filing from an external application is still how lodgings with volume work, except that today the integration runs against the Ministry’s platform and not by uploading a .txt to a website. The other is the reason an old program can appear to keep “working”: if it generates the file and leaves it at a destination that no longer collects it, nobody returns an error.

Which rule now forces the Ministerio del Interior channel

The 2003 Orden is not fully repealed, and that is the detail most often read backwards. Real Decreto 933/2021 left it standing on a condition, and its sole transitional provision drives the point home: the provisions in the repeal clause “shall continue to apply (…) until the implementing rules of this royal decree are issued, insofar as they do not conflict with what it establishes”³. The consolidated text of the Orden on the BOE carries that warning in its header¹.

Surviving in part does not reopen WebPol, and the reason lies in the condition. What survives is what does not contradict the decree, and the reporting channel is exactly what the decree replaces. Two provisions do that, and they should not be confused because they say different things:

Article 6.4 imposes the route: “The communications provided for in this article shall be made by telematic procedures”. It carries an express exception that is almost never cited, for obliged parties who provide lodging on a non-professional basis, who may file by non-telematic means “through the procedure to be determined”⁴. That procedure has not been determined, so the exception is written down but today has no way of being exercised.
The second additional provision is the one that defers to the Ministry: “The transmission and retention of the data required by this royal decree from obliged parties shall be carried out in accordance with the systems and procedures established by the Ministerio del Interior”³. It is from here, and not from article 6.4, that the system is whichever one the Ministry enables.

The implementing ministerial order that the decree empowers it to issue in its second final provision is still unpublished, and that is why the 2003 Orden never quite dies. Why that order has not arrived, and what depends on it, is in the case Brussels opened against Spain’s guest registration.

On the date: 2 December 2024 is the day the Ministerio del Interior switched the register on, and its note describes it in a sentence that admits no soft reading: the application “eliminates the old register books that companies had to draw up themselves and replaces them with the agility and functionality of modern electronic reporting systems”⁵. Since then the parte is not sent to the Police or to the Guardia Civil as a separate step: it is filed once to the Ministry’s platform and the security forces are the ones who access it there.

What data is reported today, and why it is more than before

The jump is not only one of channel. The hoja-registro in the 2003 Orden was a report template with the traveller’s and the establishment’s data¹. What the platform asks for today is Annex I of Real Decreto 933/2021, “Data to be provided in the exercise of the lodging activity”, in two versions, one for professional practice and one for non-professional. Annex II is the vehicle rental one, so a lodging never files it.

Two blocks in Annex I had no equivalent in the old parte and are the ones that generate the most queries:

The payment data. Payment type, identification of the means (card type and number, IBAN, mobile payment solution), holder of the means of payment, card expiry date and date of payment.
The family relationship between the travellers, required when one of them is a minor.

The establishment data, by contrast, is sparser than many expect, and includes no tourist registration number at all: type of establishment, name, full address, postcode, town and province.

What failing to file the parte de viajeros costs

This is the real risk of dragging an old channel along: the partes do not go out and nobody tells you. Real Decreto 933/2021 has no penalty regime of its own, as it says itself in article 8.1: infringements are governed by chapter V of Ley Orgánica 4/2015. What the decree does is classify the conduct⁶:

Conduct	Classification	Amount
Lack of the documentary registers	Serious, under article 36.20 of Ley Orgánica 4/2015	601 to 30,000 euros
Failure to file the mandatory reports	Serious, under article 36.20 of Ley Orgánica 4/2015	601 to 30,000 euros
Irregularities or deficiencies in the registers	Minor, under article 37.9 of Ley Orgánica 4/2015	100 to 600 euros
Filing out of time	Minor, under article 37.9 of Ley Orgánica 4/2015	100 to 600 euros

The brackets are set by article 39.1 of Ley Orgánica 4/2015⁷. The line that matters to anyone coming from e-Hotel is the border between the two halves of the table: a parte that goes out late is a minor infringement; a parte that never goes out is an omission, and that is serious. The detail of how each bracket is graded is in the penalties under Real Decreto 933/2021.

Catalonia and the Basque Country were already out in 2003

The Ministry’s platform does not cover the whole map, and Real Decreto 933/2021 did not invent that border. The 2003 Orden already reserved the ground in its sole additional provision:

Sole additional provision. Division of powers. The provisions of this Orden shall be without prejudice to the powers recognised in this matter to the Autonomous Communities with competence for the protection of persons and property and for the maintenance of public safety.

Orden INT/1922/2003, disposición adicional única⁸

These are the regions with their own fully fledged police force. Anyone with the property in Catalonia reports to the Mossos d’Esquadra through the Registre de viatgers, and anyone with it in the Basque Country to the Ertzaintza through its own system; the map of the three channels is in Catalonia and the Basque Country. What has disappeared is the other border, the one that organised the world of WebPol and Hospederías: today it no longer decides whether your municipality was National Police or Guardia Civil territory.

What to do if you still have WebPol credentials

There is nothing to recover and no password to reset, because registration in the current system does not build on the old one. The Ministry’s Sede Electrónica frames it as a procedure from scratch: registering in the application is the “prior and necessary step to be able to operate in the system”, and for that “a digital certificate or a cl@ve account is required”⁹.

Register as an obliged party. This is the first step and it goes through the Hospedajes procedure at the Ministerio del Interior’s Sede Electrónica. Signing the registration asks for Cl@ve Firma, or Autofirm@ if you work with a certificate installed on your machine⁹.
Register the establishment. One property, one record, with the sparse data Annex I asks for. A deadline of its own runs here and is often overlooked: the prior notification goes in within ten days of completing the administrative formalities required and, in any case, before starting the activity (article 6.2)⁴.
Check where your property software points. If it still generates the 2003-format file, that is the exact point where the partes get lost.
File each parte on time, within the 24 hours following the booking and the start of the contracted services (article 6.3)⁴.
Keep the digital register for three years from the end of each stay (article 5.3)⁴.

If the registration gets stuck, check SES.HOSPEDAJES credentials and access and the platform’s most frequent errors.

Frequently asked questions

Can I still file partes de viajeros through WebPol or e-Hotel? Filing partes de viajeros through WebPol or e-Hotel is no longer possible: since 2 December 2024 the data is transmitted through the procedure established by the Ministerio del Interior, which is SES.HOSPEDAJES, and that is where the second additional provision of Real Decreto 933/2021 sends it. The current channel covers the whole of Spain except Catalonia and the Basque Country, which have their own systems.

Were WebPol and e-Hotel two different systems? WebPol and e-Hotel are the two names by which one and the same channel was known, the one the National Police kept on the web to receive guest entry reports, and in practice they have been used interchangeably. No rule names them: Orden INT/1922/2003 describes the channel by what it did, the transmission of files over the Internet to the Data Processing Centre of the Dirección General de la Policía or of the Guardia Civil.

Why was my username issued at the police station and not now? The username was requested at the police station because the 2003 resolution made the police premises the intake counter for the application, although access was granted by the Direcciones Generales of the Policía and the Guardia Civil, which also set the security requirements. The current system replaces that counter with electronic identification: registration is done at the Ministerio del Interior’s Sede Electrónica with a digital certificate or Cl@ve, without going through any police premises.

Does the text file with pipe-separated fields work in SES.HOSPEDAJES? The text file with pipe-separated fields does not work in SES.HOSPEDAJES: it was the design set by the annex to the resolution of 14 July 2003 for the old channel, with ASCII code, capitals and three record types. Bulk filing still exists, but it is done by integrating the property software with the Ministry’s platform, not by uploading that file to a police website.

Who assigns my establishment code today? Today the establishment code is generated by the platform itself when you register the property, not by a directorate general. On the old channel the hotel establishment code was a ten-character field that, under the 2003 file design, was assigned by the Dirección General de la Policía and that of the Guardia Civil.

Do I have to do anything if my property software still points at e-Hotel? If your property software still points at e-Hotel you have to change the integration, and it is worth doing so before checking whether any partes have been lost: a file that is generated and never reaches its destination returns no error, so the problem stays invisible until an inspection arrives. Review the filing configuration, cross-check the reports filed on the platform against your stays over the last quarter and regularise whatever is missing.

From batch files to automatic filing

Anyone coming from e-Hotel has spent years in one of two routines: typing partes, or generating a file and uploading it by hand. The change of platform does not force the same choice again, because today the integration can start earlier, at the booking, and not at the end, at the file.

That is what RegistroViajero does. The booking arrives by iCal, the guest fills in their own data before arrival through a digital check-in available in nine languages, and the parte is filed on time with its receipt stored. Nobody builds a .txt or uploads it anywhere. You can see how the full automation works or try it for 15 days without a card.

This article is informational and is not a substitute for professional legal advice. Menu names and procedures may change between updates of the official platforms.