ЕСТИ, tourist tax and НСИ: automated regulatory reporting for Bulgarian hotels

Every Bulgarian hotelier knows the three obligations that consume hours each month: the national tourist register (ЕСТИ), the municipal tourist tax, and the monthly statistics report to the national statistics institute (НСИ). All three feed on the same data (who stayed, when, and in which room), yet they are usually entered three times, by hand, into three separate systems. This guide explains what the law requires and how a PMS can absorb nearly all of the work. It is equally relevant to international owners and operators of Bulgarian properties, who often discover these obligations only after acquiring a hotel.

ЕСТИ: the register of accommodated tourists

Under Article 116 of the Bulgarian Tourism Act, every accommodation site keeps a register of accommodated tourists and files the data into the Unified Tourist Information System (ЕСТИ). In practice this means a record for every guest (Bulgarian and foreign) with identity-document data, stay dates and the property.

How Hosterio handles it: the register entry is created automatically at check-in, with gap-free numbering and change tracking (new, corrected, deleted). For properties filing by batch, the system generates CSV files to the ministry's specification, ready for the portal. If an entry stays unfiled for more than 24 hours, the front desk gets a daily reminder, so nothing is lost between shifts. ID and passport scanning (OCR/MRZ) fills the guest's details from a photo, processing the image in memory only: data minimisation by design.

The tourist tax

Under Article 61r of the Local Taxes and Fees Act, the tax is owed per overnight stay and payable by the 15th of the following month. Manual per-room, per-category arithmetic is exactly the kind of task that waits until the deadline. Hosterio computes person-nights and the amount due automatically from actual stays and sends a reminder on the 1st with the exact figure and the deadline. The accountant sees a number, not a spreadsheet to fill.

The monthly НСИ statistics report

The accommodation activity report asks for capacity, realised overnight stays, guests split Bulgarian/foreign by country, and room revenue. All of that data already exists in the PMS. Hosterio assembles the monthly report from the register and the stays (including the nationality breakdown) instead of someone counting rows in Excel.

GDPR: the other half of compliance

Guest personal data falls under GDPR: subject access, deletion and rectification, records of processing, consent, retention periods. Hosterio ships a complete GDPR toolkit, including retention rules that anonymise data automatically when periods expire. Compliance therefore does not depend on who is on shift.

Why this is core, not a paid add-on

In Hosterio, ЕСТИ, tourist tax, НСИ and GDPR live in the core of the system and always work, even if the licence for add-on modules lapses. That is deliberate: a hotel's legal obligations should not depend on its commercial status with a software vendor. If you still keep the register by hand, book a demo and we will show you how checking a guest in creates the record by itself. See also the complete guide to choosing hotel software.