Hotels, other forms of tourist accommodation and travel and car rental agencies will have to collect extensive customer data including banking details, email and home addresses and full names as part of a regulatory framework introduced by the Government of Spain.
It is part of a traveller register created in 2022 that will now kick into action after multiple delays. The rules, which will be enforced from Monday, December 2, “border on illegality”, according to one holiday landlord.
But the Ministry of Interior says the plans will help to “fight terrorism and organised crime” by keeping comprehensive tabs on the people entering the country but business owners and hoteliers are worried they will have to shoulder the inevitable backlash.
The supposedly “indispensable” policy will replace the now-obsolete framework to monitor incoming travellers created as early as 1959 which did not include new business models including online booking websites.
The breadth of information now required from customers by tourist businesses will cover names and surnames, ID numbers, addresses and email addresses, telephone numbers, card details and account numbers. It may even have to be provided up to four times per trip, explains Carlos Garrido, president of the CEAV travel agency employers’ association.
Despite its long stint in the pipeline and the requirements impacting up to 42% of their customers, operators still aren’t sure exactly how the information collection will work. If they don’t brush up before Monday, they might be subjected to fines of between €100 and €30,000, however. The ministry has said the measure is not intended to be punitive and is predominantly to help state security forces “fight terrorism and organised crime”.
“If you book with an agency, then go to the hotel and have a rental car, everyone has to enter the data. So they can be duplicated or triplicated,” Mr Garrido told the Spanish news outlet COPE.
Local travel agencies, represented by the associations Ceav, Fetave, Acave and Unav, have raised concerns that the data collection will infringe on traveller privacy – but the ministry says the safety regulation “cannot be allowed to be born with gaps”.
As it stands, Spain is the only EU country where hospitality owners must send tourists’ ID and passport information to the police rather than keeping the data themselves – and the parts of the hotel sector think the ramped-up measures could even be illegal.
“It will be the judges who will have to validate it,” says Ramón Estalella, secretary general of the Confederation of Hotels and Tourist Accommodation (CEHAT).
Javier Jiménez, who owns several tourist lets in Vega de Santa María in Ávila, says he doesn’t understand why he has to ask customers for so much data “when this does not happen in other sectors”. He also criticised the lack of on-hand support for holiday landlords, telling COPE: “We don’t know anything and nobody has bothered to explain it to us.”
Javier also believes that the measures would create more work for the hotels and holiday establishments, come with an increased financial burden and “border on illegality”.
It’s thought that the rules could clash with the European Union’s data protection laws, which can impose heavy fines on firms judged to have shared the personal information of customers without consent.
The application has already registered 61,540 hotel establishments, 1,094 travel agencies, 222 digital platforms and 1,720 car rental companies, which have provided 4.77 million user data since its launch.
The existing regulatory system has 62,540 hotels, 1,094 travel agencies, 222 digital platforms and 1,720 car rental companies on its books. It has provided 4.77 million pieces of user data since launching and allowed law enforcement to track down 18,584 wanted people in national databases or the Schengen information system.
