Who is responsible — the owner or the property manager?
Both can be. The law places the duty on the "obligated party", which it defines as anyone who carries out the accommodation activity or acts as an intermediary in it — so a managing agent is usually an obligated party in their own right, not merely acting on someone else's behalf. Liability then falls on whoever actually failed to do the thing.
Owners assume their managing agent has taken this on. Agents assume they are acting for the owner and the owner carries the risk. Both can be wrong, and the decree is clearer about it than either party usually expects.
What the law actually says
The duty falls on the sujeto obligado — the obligated party. The decree defines the term in one sentence, and the second verb is the one that matters.
Note what it does not say. It does not say "the owner of the property". It does not say "whoever is named on the tourist licence". It says whoever carries out the activity or intermediates in it.
A managing agent who takes bookings, handles guests and runs check-in is intermediating in accommodation activity. On the face of the decree they are an obligated party themselves — not a helper acting under someone else's obligation.
Who gets fined
The decree answers this directly, and it is the sentence to remember.
Liability follows the act, not the contract. Whoever failed to report is the one who failed to report. You cannot allocate that away by agreeing between yourselves who was supposed to remember.
Both parties, not one or the other
The instinct is to treat this as a question with one answer. Often there isn't one.
The Ministry's published guidance indicates that where an intermediary is involved, each obligated party transmits the information it holds — duplicate reporting rather than delegated reporting. That surprises people, but it follows logically from both parties being obligated in their own right.
We have this from the Ministry's guidance rather than from the decree itself, which does not spell out how two obligated parties on the same booking divide the work. If your arrangement depends on the answer, it is worth confirming with a gestor rather than relying on this page.
The same reasoning is why the platforms have their own duty and it does not discharge yours. See does Airbnb register guests for you?
Whose certificate does the property go under?
What is not a matter of practice is why you should not share one. A digital certificate is not a login to SES.Hospedajes. It is a general Spanish digital identity, and whoever holds it can sign as that person across the whole of the public administration — the tax agency included.
Do not accept somebody else's, and do not hand yours over. Where an agent genuinely needs to act in the owner's name, the proper route is a written authorisation or a power of attorney, whose scope both parties can read.
Can one account cover several properties?
Yes. A professional operator registers multiple establishments, and each is registered separately and associated with the responsible entity.
Two things follow that catch managers out as they grow:
Each property is its own registration. Adding a property to your portfolio means registering that establishment, not simply adding a line somewhere. A property that has changed hands or changed manager needs its registration to reflect that.
Multi-owner portfolios need the associations right. Managing twenty properties for twelve owners is not the same as owning twenty. If the responsible entity recorded against a property does not match reality, you have a paperwork problem waiting to surface at the worst moment.
Setting it up so it holds
Whatever the arrangement, these four things should be true and written down:
- Who is registered as the obligated party for each property.
- Whose certificate each property sits under.
- Which bookings each party files — including direct bookings, owner stays and friends-and-family stays, which is exactly where the gaps appear.
- Who checks that submissions were accepted, not merely sent. A rejected filing nobody looked at is the most common way a compliant-looking process fails.
Where real money or a real portfolio is involved, the specific allocation between an owner and an agent is worth putting in front of a gestor or a lawyer. This page explains what the decree says; it cannot tell you how your particular contract interacts with it.