An obligation that applies to your apartment too
If you rent out a holiday apartment or villa, or run a car hire business in the Canary Islands, since 2 December 2024 you have one more duty: reporting traveller data to the SES.Hospedajes platform run by the Spanish Ministry of the Interior. The legal basis is Real Decreto 933/2021, and reports are filed through the sede.mir.gob.es portal.
In practice this means that at every guest check-in — and for every rental of a vehicle without a driver — the data must reach the system within 24 hours. For many owners it is yet another layer of Spanish bureaucracy, next to the vivienda vacacional licence. The good news: this particular obligation can largely be automated.
Who SES Hospedajes applies to
The reporting obligation covers two types of activity:
- Tourist accommodation — hotels, guesthouses, campsites and short-term rentals of the vivienda vacacional type, including rentals run by private individuals. It does not matter whether you have one apartment or ten — if you host guests commercially, you report.
- Car hire companies without a driver — every rental of a vehicle without a driver means reporting the renter's data.
Before you can send any report, you first need to register yourself as a landlord (arrendador) and register your property or activity on the platform. It is a one-off formality, but without it the system will not accept any parte de viajeros.
What data, and by when
The traveller report (parte de viajeros) covers, among other things:
- full name, identity document, nationality and date of birth,
- the guest's contact details,
- the relationship to any minors travelling in the group,
- contract data: the dates of the stay or rental and the payment method.
Identity document data is required for guests aged 14 and over. The traveller report must be filed within 24 hours of check-in, and the data register must be kept for 3 years. The full, up-to-date list of fields and requirements is on the official site sede.mir.gob.es — for procedural details it is always worth checking the source, as the forms and data scope are refined over time.
What happens if you do not report
The sanctions come from Ley Orgánica 4/2015: minor infringements carry fines of 100 to 600 EUR, serious ones 601 to 30,000 EUR. There is no reason to panic, but with dozens of check-ins per season it is easy to fall behind, turning a small oversight into a systemic problem. Especially since an inspection can ask for the report register covering the last three years.
Three channels for submitting data
The SES.Hospedajes platform offers three routes:
- Manual form — you log in at sede.mir.gob.es and type each guest's data into the form. Free, but slow and prone to typos.
- XML file upload — you prepare a file in the required format and upload it to the platform. Faster with many reports, but still manual work.
- Web service — your system connects to SES.Hospedajes directly via API (SOAP/XML) and submits reports automatically. It requires registering the landlord and the property beforehand and obtaining access credentials, but once configured it runs without you.
The manual reality: retyping passports every Saturday
What does it look like without automation? Guests arrive and hand over passports and ID cards; you — or whoever does the check-in — photograph the documents, and in the evening you retype the data into the platform's form. First name, surname, document number, nationality, date of birth — one by one, for every guest aged 14 or over. With a 2+2 family and two guest changeovers a week, it becomes a fixed ritual where mistakes come easily.
At a car hire company there is also the pace of the counter: the customer waits while the renter's and contract data still have to go into the system.
Automation: guests enter their own data
The more sensible model works like this: the booking system sends the guest a link to an online check-in form before arrival. The guest, in their own language and on their phone, enters the required data — and the system:
- validates the data as it is entered — checking the document number format, field completeness and the age from which document data is required,
- prepares and submits the report through the SES.Hospedajes web service, with no manual logging into the platform,
- keeps a report register stored for the required 3 years, ready in case of an inspection,
- processes data in line with the GDPR — the guest knows who collects their data and why, and it does not float around as passport photos on WhatsApp.
The foundation is well-designed booking forms: the same data you collect for the booking becomes the starting point for the report, instead of being typed twice. For holiday apartments it also means a faster on-site check-in: keys and a short welcome instead of a document-scanning session.
An extension built as a custom implementation
One important caveat: automatic guest registration with SES.Hospedajes is not a standard feature of WebsiteOK packages. It is an extension of the booking system that I build on request, as a custom implementation, quoted individually — the scope depends on the property type, the number of properties and how your guest workflow looks. I describe what such an implementation includes on the feature page for SES Hospedajes guest registration.
If you run apartments, villas or a car hire business in the Canary Islands and want your SES.Hospedajes reports to happen in the background — without retyping passports every Saturday — get in touch via the contact page. I will look at your current process and prepare an individual quote for the extension.