TL;DR — If you manage 5 to 200 short-term rental units across Spain, Portugal, Italy or France, your compliance stack needs to do more in 2026 than file guest data with the police. The arrival of Regulation (EU) 2024/1028 on 20 May 2026 — and the national registration regimes already live in each country — means you now have two distinct compliance layers to cover. Most current tools, including Chekin, were built around Layer 1 (guest registration). This guide explains how to evaluate Chekin alternatives against both layers, what country coverage actually means in practice, and why price-per-unit is the wrong starting question.
The 2026 problem: Layer 1 is no longer enough
For most of the last decade, “STR compliance software” meant one thing: scanning a guest’s passport at check-in and pushing the data to the local police portal. That is Layer 1 — guest registration. It is what SES Hospedajes (Spain), SIBA (Portugal), Alloggiati Web (Italy) and Déclaloc-adjacent municipal systems (France) were built to consume.
Layer 1 is necessary. It is no longer sufficient.
Layer 2 is the registration-number lifecycle: issuing the licence for each unit, keeping it valid, ensuring it appears correctly on every Airbnb / Booking.com / Vrbo listing, renewing it before expiry, and filing the periodic returns each regime now demands. Under Regulation (EU) 2024/1028, every member state must operate a Single Digital Entry Point (SDEP) that exchanges registration-number data with the platforms — meaning the listing field on your OTA is no longer cosmetic. A mismatch or absence is now machine-checkable and machine-enforceable.
Most existing compliance tools, Chekin included, were architected for Layer 1. When you evaluate alternatives in 2026, your first filter should be: does this tool understand registration-number state, or only guest data?
Country coverage: what to actually look for
“EU coverage” is a marketing phrase. The reality is four very different regimes, plus the SDEP layer arriving in 2026.
Spain — SES Hospedajes + autonomous-community registries
Guest data is filed to SES Hospedajes under Real Decreto 933/2021, with the technical schema fixed by Orden INT/1525/2022 and subsequent updates. Real Decreto 1312/2024 introduced the Ventanilla Única Digital de Arrendamientos (VUDA), the Spanish SDEP, with registration numbers issued through the Registro de Arrendamientos. On top of that, each autonomous community (Andalucía, Catalunya, Comunitat Valenciana, etc.) runs its own touristic registry with its own number format. A tool that “covers Spain” should handle SES Hospedajes filings, the autonomous-community number, and the VUDA registration — not one of the three.
Portugal — SIBA + RNAL
Guest data goes to SIBA (Sistema de Informação de Boletins de Alojamento), operated by SEF/AIMA. The Alojamento Local registration number — the AL number you see on every Portuguese listing — is issued through the Registo Nacional de Alojamento Local at rnt.turismodeportugal.pt under Decreto-Lei 128/2014, as amended by Decreto-Lei 76/2024. Annual occupancy returns (the modelo estatístico) are a separate Layer 2 obligation operators routinely forget.
Italy — Alloggiati Web + CIN
Guest data goes to Alloggiati Web, the Polizia di Stato portal. The Codice Identificativo Nazionale (CIN), introduced by DL 145/2023 article 13-ter and now operated through the Banca Dati Strutture Ricettive, is the registration number that must appear on every listing, every advertisement, and at the property entrance. Regional registration numbers (CIR in Lombardy, CIPAT in Trentino, etc.) still apply alongside the CIN. A tool covering “Italy” needs to understand both.
France — Déclaloc and the loi Le Meur
The municipal numéro d’enregistrement regime expanded under loi 2024-1039 (loi Le Meur), which lowered the threshold for mandatory registration and tightened obligations on platforms. Déclaloc is the centralised declaration portal in many municipalities, but Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux and other zones tendues run their own systems with their own forms and renewal cadences. There is no single national portal — yet — for guest data; obligations vary by commune.
EU layer — SDEP and Regulation 2024/1028
Regulation (EU) 2024/1028 takes full effect on 20 May 2026. From that date, each member state operates an SDEP that exchanges registration-number data with the OTAs on a defined STR-AP JSON schema, with OAuth2 client-credentials authentication. In practice, this means the registration number on your Airbnb listing will be validated automatically against the issuing authority. Tools that do not track registration-number state across the lifecycle will be blind to the most common failure mode of 2026 onwards: a number that was valid when the listing was created and is no longer valid today.
Evaluation criteria for Chekin alternatives
When you are comparing tools, six questions cut through marketing copy faster than any feature list.
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Does it return submission receipts? When you file a guest record to SES Hospedajes or SIBA, the portal returns an acknowledgement. A serious tool stores that receipt and exposes it in your audit trail. If the only proof you have is “the dashboard says green”, you cannot defend yourself in an inspection.
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Does it validate the registration number, or just store the string? Storing “VT-12345-A” in a database is trivial. Verifying that the number is currently valid in the autonomous-community registry, that it matches the property address, and that it appears correctly on each OTA listing — that is Layer 2. Ask the vendor specifically.
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Does it monitor OTA listing-field parity? Your Airbnb listing, your Booking.com listing and your Vrbo listing each have a registration-number field. Under the SDEP regime, these are the fields the platforms will validate. A tool that does not check what is actually on the listing — versus what should be — is missing the failure mode that Regulation (EU) 2024/1028 is designed to enforce.
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Does it integrate with your PMS, and how many? If you run Guesty, Hostaway, Smoobu, Lodgify or Avantio, the integration depth matters. A read-only API pull is not the same as a two-way sync that can update a listing field automatically.
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What does the audit trail look like under inspection? If a Spanish Guardia Civil unit walks into your office tomorrow and asks for proof you filed every parte de viajero in the last twelve months, can you produce a per-property, per-day report with portal receipts attached? That is the test.
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Who owns the failure when a filing breaks? Read the contract. If the vendor’s PMS connector silently stops syncing for three weeks and you accumulate a backlog of unfiled guest records, the legal exposure under Real Decreto 933/2021 sits with you, the operator — not the vendor. Tools differ in how transparently they surface failed filings.
How Chekin and similar tools position today
Chekin’s publicly documented feature set centres on guest onboarding, ID scanning, online check-in, payment collection and police-portal filings across multiple countries. It is a Layer 1 tool with strong guest-experience features bolted on. Operators who need a smooth digital check-in flow and reliable filing to SES Hospedajes / SIBA / Alloggiati Web are well-served by that category of tool, and Chekin sits in that category alongside others.
What this category does not historically address — and where you should ask pointed questions when comparing alternatives — is the registration-number side: lifecycle tracking, OTA listing-field validation, autonomous-community renewal calendars, the modelo estatístico in Portugal, the CIN-vs-regional-number reconciliation in Italy, and SDEP readiness for May 2026. Some vendors are adding pieces of this; coverage varies. Read each product page for what it claims explicitly, and treat anything not listed as not yet shipped.
Price-per-unit versus failure cost
The most common mistake operators make when choosing a compliance tool is anchoring on the monthly price-per-unit figure. €2 per unit per month sounds different from €5 — until you cost out the failure modes.
A single missed week of SES Hospedajes filings across a 30-unit portfolio, if it surfaces in an inspection, can produce a sanction that exceeds an entire year of platform fees at any price point in the market. A registration number that quietly expired six months ago and is still displayed on an Airbnb listing is, under Regulation (EU) 2024/1028 and the platforms’ enforcement obligations, a delisting event. The lost bookings from a delisting in peak season dwarf the software bill by an order of magnitude.
The right framing is: what is the lowest-priced tool that closes both Layer 1 and Layer 2 for the countries I actually operate in? If a cheaper tool covers Layer 1 only, you are not saving money — you are deferring a cost.
Próxima etapa: how to start your own audit
If you want a concrete starting point before you book demos with any vendor, run an audit of your own portfolio first. The Conforme Free Audit Tool lets you paste an Airbnb, Booking.com or Vrbo listing URL and returns a one-page PDF in under sixty seconds showing your registration-number compliance gaps and per-country fine exposure. No signup is required for the audit itself.
- Run the free audit: https://conforme.info/audit
- Reserve early access for Layer-2 lifecycle automation: https://conforme.info/signup
Conforme is being built specifically around the Layer 2 problem — registration-number lifecycle, OTA listing-field parity, autonomous-community renewals and SDEP readiness — to sit alongside whichever Layer 1 tool you already use. Early-access spots are limited per country.
Frequently asked questions
Is Chekin a bad product? No. Chekin is a well-established Layer 1 tool with a strong guest-experience feature set. The question for 2026 is whether Layer 1 alone covers your obligations, given that Regulation (EU) 2024/1028 takes full effect on 20 May 2026 and shifts material enforcement weight onto registration-number validity.
Do I need separate tools for Layer 1 and Layer 2? For now, in most cases, yes. Very few products cover both layers credibly across all four major EU markets. The pragmatic stack in 2026 is a Layer 1 tool you trust for guest filings plus a Layer 2 tool that handles registration-number lifecycle and OTA parity.
What changes on 20 May 2026? Each EU member state must operate a Single Digital Entry Point that exchanges short-term-rental registration data with the platforms under a common JSON schema. In practice, the registration number on your OTA listings becomes machine-validated against the issuing authority, and mismatches become enforceable.
Who is liable if my compliance tool fails to file a guest record? Under Real Decreto 933/2021 in Spain, and the equivalent regimes in Portugal, Italy and France, the legal obligation sits with the accommodation operator. A vendor’s failure does not transfer liability. This is why submission receipts and a per-property audit trail matter more than dashboard colours.
How do I know if my registration number is currently valid?
Check the issuing authority directly: the autonomous-community registry in Spain, rnt.turismodeportugal.pt in Portugal, the Banca Dati Strutture Ricettive for the Italian CIN, or the relevant municipal portal in France. If the number on your OTA listings does not match what the registry shows today, treat it as urgent. Operators should confirm renewal cadences with their local authority, as these vary by region.
Can I just wait until May 2026 to act? Not advisable. The national registration regimes — VUDA in Spain, RNAL in Portugal, CIN in Italy, the loi Le Meur regime in France — are already live and already enforced. The May 2026 date hardens platform-side validation; it does not start the clock on the underlying obligations, which are already running.