Regulation 2024/1028 is live: keeping Bulgarian hotels and rentals listed, and what a PMS must do about ESTI

Regulation (EU) 2024/1028 on the collection and sharing of data relating to short-term accommodation rental services has applied in full since 20 May 2026. It is a regulation, not a directive, so it took effect in Bulgaria without a transposition act, and it changed the relationship between a property, the booking platforms and the state in three concrete ways.

First, every property offered on a platform needs a registration number issued by the national scheme; in Bulgaria that is the registration in the Unified Tourist Information System, ЕСТИ, run by the Ministry of Tourism. Second, platforms must verify that number, not merely display it, and must deactivate listings whose number is missing or invalid. Third, platforms report activity data for each listing monthly to a Single Digital Entry Point operated by the state, which makes it available to the municipality and the revenue agency. Bulgarian press estimated in March that up to half of the domestic listings on the large platforms lacked a valid registration and would be removed; since May that has been happening.

What changes for a hotel

Categorised hotels were already in ЕСТИ and already obliged to report every guest, so the regulation does not add a new duty. What it adds is a new consequence: a stale or wrong registration number on a channel now takes the property offline on that channel. The registration number has to be treated as a piece of master data with an owner, an expiry (categorisation certificates lapse) and a place in every channel mapping. We moved it out of a free text field into a validated field on the property record, with the categorisation expiry next to it and a warning ninety days before it runs out.

What changes for guest houses and apartments

This is where most of the movement is. Owners who used to list a flat without registering now need the municipal registration, the ЕСТИ account and, on the day of each arrival, the guest report. A property management system serving this segment needs the same ЕСТИ integration as a hotel, sized for an owner with two apartments rather than a front desk with two hundred rooms: one button at check-in, the report sent, the confirmation stored.

Guest reporting, done properly

ЕСТИ expects, for every stay, the guest's name, date of birth, nationality, identity document, the room, arrival and departure dates and number of nights, submitted on the day of arrival. The two ways this goes wrong in practice are timing and data quality. Timing: reports pushed once at night miss the "day of arrival" rule for late check-ins after midnight; send at check-in, not on a schedule. Data quality: a passport read by hand produces a date of birth in the wrong order or a Cyrillic-Latin transliteration the system rejects. An MRZ scan from the check-in device or the guest's own pre-arrival upload removes most of the rejections, and the PMS should store the ЕСТИ acknowledgement against the folio so that an inspection can be answered from the screen.

The same record feeds the Ministry of Interior address registration that hotels perform on behalf of foreign guests, and the personal data in it is governed by GDPR: keep it as long as the Tourism Act requires for the register, and no longer in the marketing profile.

Reconciling with what the platform reports

The part vendors underestimate is that the state now receives two views of the same month: the property's own guest reports, and the platform's monthly activity data through the Single Digital Entry Point. Those will be compared. A PMS should therefore be able to produce, per channel and per month, the number of nights and guests it reported, so that a discrepancy with the platform's figure (a cancelled booking reported as a stay, a walk-in that never touched the platform) can be explained before someone else asks.

Tourist tax

The tourist tax remains a municipal charge per guest per night, set locally between BGN 0.20 and 3.00 (now expressed in euro) and often differentiated by category. The monthly declaration is based on the same nights the ЕСТИ reports contain, so it should be generated from them, not typed. Amendments to the Tourism Act announced on 21 August 2026 would oblige municipalities to spend at least half of the proceeds on events and transport; that changes where the money goes, not how the hotel declares it, but it is a sign that collection will get more attention.

A short checklist

• Registration number validated and stored once, pushed to every channel mapping.
• Categorisation expiry tracked with a reminder.
• ЕСТИ report sent at check-in, acknowledgement stored on the folio.
• Document scanning or guest pre-check-in to cut rejections.
• Monthly per-channel nights report for reconciliation with platform data.
• Tourist tax declaration generated from reported nights.

Our booking engine and property management platform do all of the above for hotels, guest houses and apartment operators in Bulgaria. If you run a property and your listing went quiet in May, the fix is almost always the registration number, and it is a one-day job.