Part two of the series “eVisitor, tourist tax and the duty to register” — the user’s guide.
Part one dealt with the question of whether you have to register. The answer was: almost always, including when you never let. This part is about the how — and about the places where foreign owners regularly get stuck.
eVisitor is not a complicated system. It is a confusing system with Croatian administrative logic and a set of default settings that quietly decide whether your registration is correct or not.
What eVisitor actually is
eVisitor is the central electronic system for registering and deregistering tourists in Croatia. The guest list, along with registration and deregistration, is kept exclusively in this system — there is no official parallel route on paper any more.
It is operated and maintained by the Croatian National Tourist Board (Hrvatska turistička zajednica). The system connects all the local tourist boards; the boards use the data among other things to observe tourist traffic, for analysis and for visitor management, and state bodies access it within their remit.
In practice that means: what you enter is not an informal note to the local board, it is an entry in a national database.
Access runs through the browser; nothing needs to be installed.
Step 1: getting access
You do not get credentials online and not from a central office, but from the tourist board of the municipality where your property is.
What to bring:
- Identity card or passport
- Proof of ownership (land registry extract, vlasnički list)
- OIB — the Croatian tax identification number. Practically nothing works in Croatia without one; as a foreign property owner you will normally already have it, at the latest since the purchase.
- An email address and phone number for managing access
- If you let: additionally the approval decision (rješenje o odobrenju za pružanje ugostiteljskih usluga u domaćinstvu)
That last point marks the decisive fork. Without that decision you are set up in the system as a non-commercial user — which is correct for owners who only use the property themselves, but for landlords means they simply may not let legally. More on that in part three.
If your Croatian is limited, do not leave the appointment to the last minute. The staff are usually helpful but rarely speak German or English, and in high season it is busy.
Step 2: check how your property is classified
This is the most important and most underestimated step of the whole setup.
eVisitor distinguishes not only between commercial and non-commercial properties but, within the non-commercial category, additionally by whether the property belongs to a local resident or to a holiday-home owner. That setting determines which guest categories the registration form offers you at all.
If your house is wrongly recorded as belonging to a local resident, you are offered categories that do not fit your situation — and you inevitably pick a wrong one. In the relevant owner forums this is the single most discussed point: owners asking which of the offered categories is the right one, while in truth the basic setting of their property is wrong.
For a property used exclusively as a holiday home, without letting and without Croatian residence, the correct classification is kuća/stan za odmor — house or flat for holidays. Only the tourist board can change it, not you.
Practical tip: before you get into guest categories, sort out this one setting. Most follow-up questions then answer themselves.
Step 3: the data you need from every guest
Registration requires a complete identification of every person staying overnight. In practice:
- First and last name
- Date of birth
- Nationality and country of birth
- Place of residence and country of residence
- Type of identity document (identity card or passport)
- Document number
- Arrival date and planned departure date
- Guest category, or the ground for exemption or reduction
This applies to every person, including small children who pay no tourist tax. Exemption from payment is not exemption from being recorded.
The data protection angle
The legal basis for collecting this is the accommodation provider’s statutory obligation — so you do not need separate consent from your guests to collect and enter the data.
What you should pay attention to: the widespread habit of having identity documents photographed and sent by WhatsApp, then keeping the images on the phone for months, is questionable under data protection law. To meet the registration duty you need the data, not the picture. Delete copies of identity documents as soon as the entry is in the system, and avoid a messenger for the transfer where you can.
Step 4: register and — just as important — deregister
The deadlines differ depending on which role you hold in the system.
As a landlord (providing accommodation services in a household) you register everyone to whom you offer an overnight stay within 24 hours of arrival, and deregister them within 24 hours of departure.
As the owner of a holiday property that is not let you register everyone staying overnight within 24 hours of arrival and deregister their stay on its last day.
Exception for the annual flat rate: if you pay the tourist tax for yourself and your closest family as an annual flat rate, registration and deregistration happen once with the tourist board, namely when the flat rate is paid. For all other guests, individual registration still applies.
Deregistration is not a formality. Forgotten deregistrations are the most common reason a stay keeps running in the system and the levy calculation goes off the rails. A guest who was never deregistered keeps generating overnight stays.
The six most common mistakes
1. Wrong property classification. See above. If the basic setting is wrong, every further entry is at best half right.
2. Forgotten deregistration. Especially on your own departure, when you are mentally already on the motorway.
3. A typo in the document number. The number is the identifying feature. One transposed digit makes the entry faulty — and in an inspection there is then a person in the system nobody can match.
4. The wrong guest category. The difference between the owner, a member of the closest family and an ordinary guest decides the rate. The 70 per cent reduction applies only to the first two groups.
5. Not recording children at all. Children under 12 pay nothing but must be registered.
6. Registering only after departure. Anyone who “catches up” on Monday after a weekend stay has broken the 24-hour deadline — even if the right amount comes out at the end.
Automation: what works and what does not
For landlords with frequent changeovers there is software that passes booking data to eVisitor through an interface. Anyone letting through portals who already uses a channel manager can largely get rid of typing in document data. That is a real relief, and for properties with weekly changeovers in summer the setup effort usually pays off.
Two honest limitations are worth knowing.
First: automation solves the data problem, not the completeness problem. The software can only pass on what it was given. If the guest enters their document number incorrectly during online check-in, or does not mention a child travelling with them, the entry is exactly as wrong as it would have been typed by hand — only faster.
Second: for owners who only use the property themselves, the effort practically never pays off. With five stays a year, setting it up is out of all proportion.
And one point that tends to get skipped in the debate: there is an argument going around that with a key safe and automated guest registration you no longer need anybody looking after the property at all. For the registration duty alone, that is even true. Only, software does not deal with a burst pipe in February, storm damage after the bura, or letting a tradesperson in. The two subjects simply have little to do with each other.
Delegating the registration
You do not have to do this yourself. The registration duty can in practice be handed to somebody locally — an agency, a property care service, or a person you trust who is given access to the system.
Important: the responsibility stays with you. Who files is a question of division of labour; who is liable is a question of law. So make sure you always have visibility of the system and can see what was filed in your name. A caretaker who will not give you access to your own registration data is a warning sign.
If you now realise something is not right
The pragmatic route always runs through the local tourist board, not a central authority. Property classification, access credentials and open matters can all be sorted out there. Someone who comes forward is as a rule treated far more calmly than someone with an inspector at the door in August.
We take this on for our clients — including checking the property master data, setting up access and the ongoing registrations. We charge for the work, not as a share of your income.
This article describes practice under the Croatian law on the tourist tax (Zakon o turističkoj pristojbi, NN 52/19, 32/20, 42/20) and the regulation on the eVisitor system. It is not legal or tax advice. Procedures and screens can change; what governs is the information given by your local tourist board.