What is KBS?
If you run a hotel, apartment, villa, guesthouse, pension, or other accommodation business in Türkiye, reporting who's staying with you is a legal obligation, not a Misfora feature request.
Kimlik Bildirim Sistemi (KBS, "Identity Notification System") is the electronic system operated by Türkiye's General Directorate of Security (Emniyet Genel Müdürlüğü, EGM) under the Ministry of Interior. It lets registered accommodation businesses submit guest and staff identity information to the police electronically, in real time, instead of on paper.
KBS itself isn't a business license — it's the reporting channel. What you need before you can use it depends on what kind of property you run, covered in the section below.
Who has to report guests?
The obligation is set out in Law No. 1774 (Kimlik Bildirme Kanunu, "Identity Reporting Law"), and it's broader than "hotels" in the everyday sense. It applies to the operators of:
Including pensions and guesthouses.
Short-term apartments and villas.
Campgrounds and similar facilities.
Added to the law's scope by a December 2025 amendment (Law No. 7565), along with certain maritime tourism vehicles.
The obligation applies to both Turkish and foreign guests, and covers everyone staying, temporarily or permanently, at a covered establishment.
What the law requires
In practical terms, a covered accommodation business needs to keep daily identity and arrival/departure records for guests, and — for the establishments the law names specifically — connect to law enforcement's systems so records can be reported electronically.
The responsible operator of a covered establishment also has to be reported to the nearest law-enforcement office before the property opens — and again within 24 hours if the responsible operator changes.
Do I need a "KBS license"?
Not as a separate thing, no — this is where a lot of confusion starts. There's no standalone "KBS license" you apply for the way you'd apply for a business license.
Instead, two things need to be true, and they're worth keeping separate in your head:
A municipal business license, a Ministry of Culture and Tourism certificate, or a Tourism Purpose Housing Permit — depending on what you run. This is what makes the property a legitimate accommodation business in the first place.
Once you're legitimately operating, the Law No. 1774 reporting obligation applies, and registered establishments get access to kbs.egm.gov.tr to submit records.
Misfora deals with the second part — turning a guest's document into the data your KBS reporting needs. It doesn't replace the permit, license, or municipal authorization itself.
Vacation rentals & villas: a separate permit
If you rent out a residential property to tourists for up to 100 days at a time, a different law applies on top of the identity-reporting rules above: Law No. 7464, on the short-term tourism rental of residences. It requires a Tourism Purpose Housing Permit (Turizm Amaçlı Konut İzin Belgesi) for covered short-term rentals, applied for electronically through the Ministry of Culture and Tourism's e-Devlet-based portal.
Properties that hold this permit are then also subject to the Law No. 1774 identity-reporting rules described above — the permit and the KBS reporting obligation work together, not as alternatives to each other.
Misfora operates at the last step. Exactly which documents a permit application needs depends on the applicant and the property — the Ministry's own guidance is the authoritative source, since requirements change; see official sources below.
The legal framework
Kimlik Bildirme Kanunu — the core law establishing the identity and arrival/departure reporting obligation, and the legal basis for electronic reporting through KBS.
Amended Law No. 1774 in December 2025 — extended its scope to marinas, port and coastal facilities, and certain maritime tourism vehicles, and adjusted the enforcement provisions.
Governs short-term tourism rental of residences and the Tourism Purpose Housing Permit described above.
Türkiye's Personal Data Protection Law. Guest passport and ID data is personal data — KVKK governs how it can be collected, used, and retained, including the legal grounds for processing it without separate consent when it's required for a legal obligation like KBS reporting.
Given how recently Law No. 7565 changed the scope of Law No. 1774, older articles online describing only the classic hotel/motel scenario, or citing older penalty amounts, may no longer be current — check the sources linked at the bottom of this page rather than a random blog post.
How Misfora automates guest reporting
Manually, the process looks like: staff receive the booking, the guest hands over a passport, someone reads and types the details, mistakes get corrected by hand, and the record eventually gets submitted. It's slow even for one hotel, and it doesn't scale to several unstaffed apartments.
Reservation arrives
From a connected PMS like Exely, or directly from a Google Sheet if you don't run a PMS at all.
Guest gets a registration link
Opens on their own phone. No app to install.
Guest photographs their passport or ID
Captured directly in the browser, with live quality checks before anything uploads — see how document capture works. Misfora can extract passport information from a photo using OCR and MRZ recognition — try the passport data extractor on its own.
Data is structured and verified
The document becomes structured guest data instead of a typed-in guess.
Registration is submitted to KBS
For Turkish properties, the resulting guest data is submitted to KBS automatically — no separate manual step.
Your existing booking workflow stays put
A hotel keeps its PMS. A villa manager keeps their spreadsheet. The registration workflow underneath is the same either way.
KBS reporting without a PMS
A small property — a couple of apartments, a villa, a handful of vacation rentals, a spreadsheet someone already keeps up to date — doesn't necessarily need a full PMS just to handle guest registration.
Your existing spreadsheet becomes the reservation source — see how the Google Sheets integration works. If a property already runs a PMS instead, the same registration workflow sits on top of that — see connecting Exely.
What Misfora doesn't replace
It doesn't issue a tourism permit, issue a business license, register a property with the municipality, decide whether a property is legally permitted to operate, or replace the responsible operator's legal responsibilities.
The accommodation operator remains responsible for complying with Turkish law. Misfora automates the operational part — collecting guest identity data and preparing it for reporting.
Questions
Is KBS the same as a business license?+
Does KBS apply to villas and apartments, not just hotels?+
Do I need a PMS to report through KBS?+
What changed with Law No. 7565 in December 2025?+
Does Misfora submit data to KBS automatically?+
Is this page legal advice?+
Official sources
For anything that actually affects your obligations, use the source, not this page.