Which European Countries Require Police Registration of Guests?

Why does Europe require guest registration at all?

Article 45 of the Schengen Convention is the constitutional root of guest registration across the Schengen area: accommodation managers must ensure foreign nationals personally complete and sign a registration form, prove their identity, and that the completed forms are kept available for the competent authorities. Every national system in this article — UbyPort, SES.Hospedajes, Alloggiati Web, eVisitor, and the rest — is a national implementation of that one shared obligation, built independently over the following decades. Ireland and the United Kingdom, which never joined the Schengen area, have their own parallel rules under national immigration law instead of Article 45.

Regulation (EU) 2024/1028, applicable since 20 May 2026, harmonizes a different layer entirely: short-term rental registration numbers and the data platforms report about listings. It deliberately does not touch guest/police reporting, which is why the patchwork below still exists and will keep existing even as the registration-number layer becomes uniform.

Which countries have automated national reporting systems?

Which countries require registration but have no central system?

Two countries stand out for having essentially no equivalent duty: Poland, where the hotel police-reporting obligation for short stays was abolished, and the Netherlands, where accommodation providers keep a digital night register (nachtregister) for statistical and tax purposes but there’s no guest-identity reporting duty to the police.

How do deadlines and scope differ?

The deadline spread is the single biggest operational difference: Slovenia and Croatia require same-day reporting (12–24 hours), while Slovakia allows a full 5 days (calendar days, not working days). That’s not a minor detail for a multi-country operator — a workflow tuned to Slovakia’s generous window will miss Slovenian and Croatian deadlines by days if applied unchanged.

Scope is the second axis. Austria, Croatia, and Italy report every guest regardless of nationality; Czechia, Slovakia, Portugal, France, and Germany focus the formal duty on foreign guests. This matters for what data you’re legally required (and permitted) to collect from a domestic guest versus a foreign one — over-collecting from domestic guests “to be safe” is itself a data minimization problem, not a safety margin.

What are the penalties?

Penalties for missing or late reports vary enormously in both structure and size:

• Spain: €100–600 for a late report, €601–30,000 for a missing one — the highest ceiling in this comparison.
• Croatia: €660–6,600 per violation under eVisitor rules.
• Czechia: up to 50,000 Kč (roughly €2,000) under the Act on Residence of Foreign Nationals.
• Italy: penalties attach primarily to the separate CIN registration-code requirement, up to €8,000, alongside Alloggiati Web reporting duties.
• Portugal: €100–2,000 or more depending on the severity and recurrence of the violation.

How Best Guest helps

Best Guest automates UbyPort filing in Czechia today, where an official public API exists and the reporting workflow runs without manual intervention. For Slovakia, where no public API exists and submission is bound to the operator’s own eID identity, Best Guest prepares the police report as a ready-to-file document instead of overstating what can be automated. Other countries in the tables above are being added to the roadmap in rough order of API availability — see the countries hub for what’s live today, or read about running properties across multiple countries if you’re expanding into a second market for the first time.