E-notification for a hotel company: how official notices arrive and who watches them

E-tebligat is the delivery of an official notice to a company's electronic notification address instead of by post. Under Article 7/a of the Notification Law (No. 7201) it is mandatory for private-law legal persons, and a notice counts as served at the end of the fifth day after it reaches that address, opened or not.

A tax notice reaches the company's electronic notification address on a Tuesday and nobody opens it. Under the rule that governs that address, nothing has been delayed: the fifth day runs anyway, and whatever period the notice sets starts counting from it. This article explains what the electronic notification address is, which companies must have one, how the fifth-day rule works, and how it differs from registered electronic mail (KEP). By the end you will have a small routine: who logs in, how often, who is told, and what to write down.

Why does a notice nobody opened still count as served?#

Because the law ties service to the notice reaching the company's electronic address, not to a person reading it. Article 7/a of the Notification Law (opens in a new tab) (No. 7201, consolidated text, Mevzuat Bilgi Sistemi, 13 Nov 2026) says an electronic notification is deemed made at the end of the fifth day after the day it reaches that address.

Put the shift in plain words. A paper notice needed a postman, an envelope and a signature at the door, and the signature was the moment service happened. The electronic address removed the signature but kept the legal effect: the system records that the file reached the company's address, and the law attaches a service date to that record alone.

What actually lands there for a hotel is ordinary official correspondence: a court notice, a tax office letter, an enforcement office notice, a social security (SGK) letter, none of them waiting for anyone. Two facts get confused here, and they are different things: the notice arriving, and the notice being read. Only the first is recorded by the system, and only the first moves the calendar.

The consequence, stated without drama: the risk is not the notice itself, it is the gap between arrival and the first person in the building who reads it. A hotel has a structural version of this problem. The front desk never closes, but official correspondence lands on the back-office side, which does close, and which thins out exactly when the season peaks.

For example, a notice reaches the address on a Friday, the fifth day falls while the owner is at a trade fair abroad, and the period runs with nobody in the room. Nothing in that story is unusual, which is the point.

The rest of this article answers the operational question that follows: who logs in, how often, and who is told. If a fine notice reaches the hotel and the period to object starts, the date that starts the clock is the one the system recorded, not the one someone noticed.

What is e-tebligat and which system carries it?#

E-tebligat (electronic notification) is the delivery of an official notice to a company's electronic notification address instead of by post. In Türkiye it does not run through a single system: notices served under the Notification Law go through UETS, the national system run by PTT; the tax administration sends through its own system in the Digital Tax Office; and SGK sends employers' notices under its own regulation.

The address deserves a precise definition, because most of the confusion around e-notification for companies in Türkiye starts here. It is not an email inbox. It is a defined legal address inside a state system, and that is exactly why the law can attach a service date to it: the system knows what landed, and when.

The mechanism is simple. A public body sends the notice, the system places the file at the company's address, and the system records the date it arrived. The senders a hotel actually meets are courts, tax offices, enforcement offices and SGK, and they do not all use the same channel. Check each of them. The tax administration's system can also be reached through e-Devlet, and under SGK's regulation its electronic notification address is set up within e-Devlet or in a system another institution has set up.

Now the line the reader most often misses. A message to info@ or to the accountant's own email is not an e-tebligat and carries none of its effects. It is ordinary correspondence, and no clock starts with it.

Operationally, the hotel needs at least one person who can log in, a second person who can, and a written note of who they are. That is the whole requirement, and the rest of this article builds the routine around it.

Two honest limits. This article does not cover how the address is obtained, what registration involves or what it costs, because those points are not established by the sources used here; confirm them through the system's own guidance. And avoid the reverse error too: receiving e-tebligat does not replace the other channels a company uses for its own outgoing correspondence.

Which companies must use an electronic notification address?#

Article 7/a of the Notification Law (opens in a new tab) makes electronic notification mandatory for a list of persons that includes all private-law legal persons (consolidated text, Mevzuat Bilgi Sistemi, 13 Nov 2026), so a hotel operated by a joint-stock or limited company is covered.

Read the structure of the article rather than looking for a threshold. The law names categories of persons, and private-law legal persons are one of those categories. There is no revenue test, no employee count, no room count.

Size is irrelevant. A 40-room seasonal property and a 400-room city hotel are covered on the same basis, because the duty follows the legal form, not the scale of the business. Groups need explicit handling: each company in a group is its own legal person, so a property company and a management company each receive their own notices at their own address. One login does not cover the group.

One boundary should be flagged honestly. A sole proprietorship is not a legal person, and whether the law's list reaches it is a question for the reader's own adviser, not something to infer from this article.

In practice, "mandatory" means the company must have the address and receive through it. It does not mean the company may ignore other channels; it means this one cannot be skipped. And one common overreach should be closed here: the sources used for this article do not say that KEP is compulsory for every company, and this article does not claim it.

The fifth-day rule: what starts the clock?#

Arrival starts the clock, not attention. Article 7/a deems the notification made at the end of the fifth day after the day it reaches the addressee's electronic address (Notification Law, No. 7201 (opens in a new tab), consolidated text, Mevzuat Bilgi Sistemi, 13 Nov 2026).

Keep two dates apart in your mind. The arrival date is the one the system records. The deemed-service date is the one that governs everything after it: the periods inside the notice, and any step that must follow. The rule is written this way for a reason. Without it, a company could postpone service indefinitely by simply not opening its address.

The practical consequence is blunt. A week of high-season pressure, a trade fair, a forgotten password: none of it changes the date on which the notice was served. From this, the operating rule follows directly: check often enough that the gap between arrival and a human reading the file is measured in hours, not weeks.

One misreading needs correcting. The fifth day is not a grace period for acting. It fixes when service happened. Whatever the notice asks for, objecting to a fine, responding to a court, carries its own period, and that period runs from the deemed-service date, not from the day someone finally opened the file.

Do not count the fifth day by hand on a live notice. Weekends, public holidays and the counting rules decide the exact date, and this article does not interpret them; that is a question for the company's adviser with the notice in front of them.

KEP is a different channel: what does the Commercial Code say?#

KEP (registered electronic mail) is the channel the Commercial Code names for notices between merchants, and it is not the same thing as the electronic notification address where official notices arrive.

The rule as written: Article 18(3) of the Turkish Commercial Code (opens in a new tab) says that between merchants, notices or warnings about putting the other side in default, terminating a contract or withdrawing from it are made through a notary, by registered letter, by telegram, or by registered electronic mail using a secure electronic signature (consolidated text, Mevzuat Bilgi Sistemi, 13 Nov 2026).

The clearest difference is the direction of travel. E-tebligat mostly runs from a public body to the company. KEP runs from company to company, or company to person. The hotel case makes it concrete: telling a tour operator that a contract is terminated, or putting an agency in default, is exactly the situation the article covers, and an ordinary email may not do.

The law names four channels as alternatives, and this article does not rank them or decide which one fits a given dispute; that depends on the contract and the dispute, and it is a question for the company's adviser. The honest limit repeats itself here too: the sources used for this article do not settle whether KEP is compulsory for every company, so the article does not claim it.

On record-keeping: one person can watch both channels, but the log should keep them separate, because they carry different kinds of obligation. If you want the wider picture of the other electronic documents a hotel meets each month, the same separation applies there too.

A weekly routine: who logs in, who is told, where notices are logged#

Name two people who can log in, check on a fixed day, and log every notice with its arrival date, its deemed-service date and the person who owns the response.

Assign three roles in writing rather than by assumption. An accountable owner: the general manager or the owner. An operator: the office manager or the accountant. A named backup who is not the same person as either.

Set the cadence. A fixed weekly check is the floor, and a daily glance costs minutes and shrinks exactly the gap the fifth-day rule makes expensive. If the check sits next to a hotel's monthly tax calendar, it becomes part of the same rhythm rather than a separate chore.

Define the log fields once and keep them: arrival date, sender, subject, deemed-service date, the period the notice sets, the person who owns it, status, and the date it was closed. Set one escalation rule that needs no judgment: anything from a court, an enforcement office or a tax office goes to the general manager and the company's adviser on the day it is read.

Make access follow the role, not the person. When a manager leaves or the accountant changes, the new person is added before the old one is removed, and the change is written in the log. Cover the seasonal cases by name, because each of them is a break in the same chain: an owner abroad through high season, a new front-office manager starting in July, an accountant change in January.

Keep the log out of the front desk's shift book. It is a company record with legal dates in it, not a handover note.

What to do next#

This week, write down the two names who can log in to each of the company's electronic notification channels, and put a recurring check in the calendar with an owner against it. Then log the next notice that arrives with both its arrival date and its deemed-service date. At that point the fifth-day rule stops being an abstraction and becomes a line in a file that someone actually reads.