The Spanish Confederation of Hotels and Tourist Accommodation (Cehat) has welcomed the statement from the Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD) informing that accommodation providers are not allowed to request a copy of their customers’ ID cards or passports, although they stress that the problem with Royal Decree 933/2021 - the new register of travellers - is ‘broader’.
Cehat, which warns that photocopying ID cards is illegal, points out that the royal decree is still pending legislative development, but that its application is generating ‘multiple conflicts’ with data protection regulations, as well as confusion among police forces.
The hotel association asserts that ‘ultimate responsibility’ for these problems lies with the ‘deficient regulation’ of the royal decree and the ‘lack of a clear and uniform system’ that would allow establishments to comply with legal requirements without risk. ‘We cannot allow a busload of tourists who have just arrived at a hotel to have to wait and fill out a form with such a cumbersome process and so much information as if they were applying for a visa to the United States,’ said Cehat president Jorge Marichal in a press release.
Marichal points out that there are document readers that guarantee ‘efficiency and security’ and adds that Segittur should have rolled out a single system for the whole country instead of fragmenting resources across multiple tourism projects with ‘dubious real impact on the sector’.
Among the ‘critical’ problems that Cehat identifies in the regulation are its ‘collision’ with data protection regulations, the impossibility of verifying the accuracy of the data, the absence of harmonised digital solutions and the contradictions between the obligation to keep data for three years and the principle of minimisation.
It is therefore calling for an institutional dialogue between the Ministries of the Interior and Tourism, together with industry associations, so that the regulation can be interpreted in a uniform manner, a ‘single, interoperable and secure’ national technological tool can be developed, and hotels can be prevented from assuming criminal or administrative liability due to ‘lack of legal or technical support’.