🛂 KBS Guest Registration in Turkey

• What is KBS
• Who must report
• What data, when
• How to report
• Fines
• Common mistakes
• FAQ

KBS (Kimlik Bildirim Sistemi) is the system through which accommodation properties in Turkey report guest check-ins and check-outs electronically to the general law enforcement (Police and Gendarmerie), as required by Law No. 1774 on Identity Notification. Supplementary Article 1 of the law obliges properties to keep daily guest records on a computer and to report them to law enforcement instantly; the implementing regulation, amended in 2022, states that the report is made electronically by connecting to law enforcement computer terminals (no neighbourhood-headman approval is needed).

In practice there are two separate systems:

• Police KBS — General Directorate of Security (EGM); properties in municipal / police districts.
• Gendarmerie KBS — Gendarmerie General Command; properties in gendarmerie districts (mostly rural areas, villages, highland and coastal towns).

If you do not know which district your property is in: whichever force is responsible for public order where the property stands also issues your KBS account.

Sources (Turkish): Law No. 1774 on Identity Notification · Amendment to the Implementing Regulation, Official Gazette 31869, 17 June 2022.

Article 2 of the law casts a wide net: hotels, motels, guesthouses, apart-hotels, holiday villages, campsites, inns, single rooms and similar private or public accommodation of any kind. Star rating, room count or licence type makes no difference; any property that hosts a paying guest for even one night reports. Since 2024, short-term / tourism rental homes are under the same obligation.

The responsibility lies with the operator; the operator may delegate to a manager, in which case both are jointly responsible. A receptionist saying "I did not know" does not cancel the fine, which is why reporting should be tied to a process, not to a person (see How to report).

Check-in report — before the guest goes up to the room

The law says "instantly"; in practice reception takes the ID, enters the data on the KBS site, then hands over the key. The data reported:

A guest without an identity document is not given a room; this is a legal requirement, not a courtesy.

Check-out report — when the guest leaves

As important as check-in: a guest whose check-out is not reported still appears "in house" on the KBS site. When the same guest returns, the system flags a duplicate; during an inspection, a person who is not on the premises appears registered.

Room change

If the guest moves rooms, the KBS site gets a check-out from the old room and a check-in to the new one; the record is not deleted.

What if the internet goes down?

The obligation is postponed, not cancelled: as soon as the connection returns, the accumulated check-ins are reported. If the outage lasts hours, a phone call to your police station or gendarmerie post closes the later question "why did you report late?".

How long are records kept?

Records reported to the KBS site are kept on the law-enforcement side for 5 years and then deleted automatically. The property's own guest register / PMS records are a separate obligation and are asked for during inspections.

Way 1 — Manual entry on the KBS site

Reception logs in to the KBS site with the username / password issued by the Police or Gendarmerie and types in each guest; at departure the record is found and checked out. It is free and valid for every property. Its weakness is human error: a guest skipped during a busy check-in hour, a mistyped ID number, a forgotten check-out. Fine for a small guesthouse with 2-3 guests a day; not sustainable for a 30-room hotel in season.

Way 2 — The PMS's own KBS integration

Most PMS products developed for Turkey send the report to the KBS site themselves at check-in; reception does nothing extra. This is the right way. Things to check: whether the integration works with both the Police and the Gendarmerie KBS site, and whether it also reports check-outs and room changes. An integration that reports only check-ins produces the "still in house" problem described above.

Way 3 — When your PMS is not connected to the KBS site

Most cloud PMS products based outside Turkey, and some domestic ones, have no KBS reporting. For a hotel that does not want to change its PMS, the intermediate solution is: the PMS writes the guest list to a text file, and a separate bridge program running at the hotel does the reporting; the result is written back to a file and shown by the PMS. KBS Bridge, which we developed for this purpose, adds check-in, check-out and room-change reporting to the Police and Gendarmerie KBS sites with a short file-format description for the PMS developer: KBS Integration — KBS Bridge.

Fines are imposed not by the police but by the local civil authority (governor / district governor); law enforcement inspects and writes the report. Amounts are increased every year by the revaluation rate. For 2026:

The repeat rule is the heavy part: if the same violation is repeated within the same calendar year, the last fine is applied twice over; on the fourth violation in the same year the operating licence may be revoked. A fine issued at the start of the season can close the property by the end of it.

Sources (Turkish): Law No. 1774, Supplementary Article 1 and Article 17; for the amounts, Accommodation Property Identity Notification Fine and Objection (2026). Check the amount against the year on the notice.

• Check-outs are not reported. The most common mistake. The guest stays "in house" on the KBS site; during an inspection, a "registered but not on the premises" report can count as a false record.
• Only one person is reported for a group / family. The law wants every guest, children included. A family whose spouse and child are not reported means two or three missing records.
• A foreign guest is entered by name instead of passport number. Even if the KBS site accepts it, the record cannot be identified; it risks being a false record.
• Room changes are not reported. The guest moved from 104 to 207, the KBS site still says 104. It looks minor, but it goes into the inspection report as "not keeping records".
• Reports are batched in the evening. This breaks the "instantly" rule; a guest who checked in in the morning is unregistered for law enforcement until evening. If an inspection lands in that window, a fine follows.
• The KBS password belongs to one person. When that person is on leave, reporting stops. The password should be reachable by everyone on shift (but logged).
• The PMS integration is trusted and the result is never checked. When the integration fails (KBS site under maintenance, password expired) nobody notices. A good integration shows the error on screen; reception checks once a day for "anything not reported".