Hotel and car rental companies, as well as intermediary platforms in both sectors and travel agencies, must report the details of the customers with whom they do business to the register.
This register is set out in Royal Decree 933/2021 of 26 October 2021, which has been in force since April 2022. Since then, the Ministry has maintained constant dialogue with the sectors concerned and applied different moratoriums on their implementation in order to facilitate their adaptation to the new data collection mechanism.
The register of hotel overnight stays has existed since 1959, and had become obsolete with the passage of time as it did not include new business modalities such as short-stay tourist dwellings or portals and room booking centres through digital media on the internet.
The new register now makes it possible to collect data on users of hotels, hostels, guest houses, rural tourism establishments or similar; flats, bungalows and other similar tourist accommodation, campsites and motorhome parking areas, as well as operators providing intermediary services between hostelry and consumers and digital booking platforms.
These companies will only have to enter in the new register the data they collect for their own commercial management, most of which is the same data they already communicated to the previous register which has been active since 1959. With regard to the identity of customers, the main new feature consists of stating the family relationship when a group includes minors, while commercial transactions must specify the means of payment and identify the transaction if it is paid by credit card, bank transfer or digital payment platform, systems that did not exist 65 years ago.
With regard to the registration of motor vehicle rental, it has been in existence since 1974 and its regulations are also half a century out of date. As in the previous case, the new system also obliges - in addition to companies dedicated specifically to vehicle rental - operators and digital platforms dedicated to brokerage in these activities via the internet.
A more streamlined system
The new register is hosted in the ses.hospedajes application, managed by the Secretary of State for Security of the Ministry of Home Affairs, which is responsible for the safeguarding and protection of the data hosted in it.
This application simplifies and facilitates the processing and integration of information, as it eliminates the old record books that had to be kept by the companies themselves and replaces them with the agility and functionality of modern electronic communications systems.
It is a secure and accessible application that allows the integration of external applications to facilitate the automated submission of information and mass data dump and ease the administrative burden on obliged companies.
The ses.hospedajes application is now operational. More than 61,500 hotel establishments, 1,100 travel agencies, 222 digital platforms and more than 1,700 motor vehicle rental companies have already registered in 2024.
During these months of testing, the register of overnight stays and car rentals has already received 4.8 million pieces of customer data from these companies, without being hampered by technical impediments or generating additional administrative burdens for the sectors concerned.
The ses.hospedajes registry not only modernises these police instruments that have existed in Spain for decades, but also responds to two mandates included in existing laws in the legal system:
- Article 45 of the Schengen Agreement of June 1985, which provides for the obligation to draw up and make available to the authorities the identity cards of the guests of hotel establishments.
- Organic Law 4/2015 of 30 March, which - in Article 25 - obliges various economic sectors, including accommodation and car rental, to have a documentary record of their clients.
This register has been analysed by the Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD), which concluded that its content is covered by the EU's General Data Protection Regulation. The State Council also endorsed this new regulation.
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