When a submission is rejected
Most rejections are a mismatch between what you typed and what the system expects for that particular guest, not a fault in the platform. Work through the fields in order rather than changing things at random — and never invent a document number to make an error go away.
Something that looks like a platform fault usually is not. Most rejections happen because the details entered do not match the combination of nationality, age and document type that the system expects for that specific traveller.
The first rule
Do not keep changing things until it accepts them.
It is the obvious thing to do at eleven at night with guests already in the property, and it is the one approach that turns an administrative problem into a real one. You are responsible for the details matching the document the guest actually showed you.
A late filing is a minor matter — €100 to €600. A filing containing a document number you invented is a different kind of problem entirely. If you cannot make it accept the truth, file late and correct it, rather than filing something false on time.
Work through these in order
When something is rejected, check:
- Date of birth — the most common single cause, and the one most likely to interact badly with the age rules.
- Nationality — must match the document, not where they live.
- Document type — passport, DNI or TIE. Choosing the wrong one causes validation to expect a different format entirely.
- Document number — exactly as printed, including letters.
- Issuing country of the document.
- Required address and contact fields — an empty mandatory field often reports as something unrelated.
- Age bracket — whether the guest is under 14 or 14-and-over changes what the form expects. See children.
- The property and responsible entity — that you are filing against the right establishment.
Most rejections resolve at step 1, 3 or 7.
"NIF required" — the one that confuses everybody
Particularly common with Spanish guests, and especially with teenagers.
The system may be expecting the Spanish tax identifier associated with a DNI rather than a passport number. Where the guest is Spanish and old enough to sign, the form can insist on a NIF — and a 14-year-old may simply not have one.
Do not invent a NIF. If the guest does not have the identifier being demanded, that is a limitation of the form, and manufacturing one to clear a validation message is exactly the thing article 4.3 makes you responsible for not doing.
The guest's town is not in the list
The address fields work from a list of poblaciones, and small places are often missing.
The workaround owners use: look the address up on a map and find the larger municipality it belongs to. Smaller villages are frequently administered under a bigger neighbouring town, and that is the name the list will hold.
A rejection nobody looks at
Worth repeating because it is the failure that actually causes breaches.
A submission the platform accepts is not necessarily a submission that went through completely. Individual travellers can be rejected inside an otherwise successful batch. Something filed at 23:40 and bounced back at 23:41 is, by the following evening, a missed deadline that nobody knows about.
Whatever route you use, somebody or something has to check the outcome, not just that it was sent. That is a habit rather than a technology, and it is the single cheapest improvement most owners can make.