While a seasonal hotel is closed: which returns, records and notices continue

Closing a seasonal hotel in Türkiye pauses some duties and not others. The accommodation tax period is each month the business operates, the tourism share return is due even with no sales, and the Ministry file records your open and closed periods. Confirm each item with your accountant.

The last guest leaves, the shutters come down and the owner assumes the paperwork stops with the season. Some of it does. The rest has dates attached, and those dates fall in the months when nobody is watching. This article sorts the duties of a closed seasonal hotel, from returns to KBS access to staff exits, so that by the end you can put the whole season onto one sheet and hand it to your accountant before the doors close.

Why is a closed hotel not one status?#

Closure is not a single switch. It is a set of separate statuses, and each duty in this article hangs off a different one.

Four triggers decide everything: whether the business operated in a given month, whether the taxpayer is still registered, whether anyone is employed, and what the facility file says about the season. A hotel can be physically shut and still count as operating for one duty: a month with three open days is an operating month, not a closed one. The reverse also happens, because a property open for maintenance with no guests is still a registered taxpayer with a filing calendar.

The practical consequence is to build the closure list by duty, not by date. The date is a column, not the organising principle. Give every row an owner: operations belong to the owner or general manager, returns to the accountant, employment questions to the payroll adviser. Write the list once, at the end of the season, and keep it for the next one. The same rows come back in the same order, and if you are still deciding when to close, the week-by-week contribution test for seasonal opening and closing is the companion question.

Which returns continue while a seasonal hotel is closed?#

The returns that follow your registration continue. The accommodation tax follows the months you operate, and the tourism share return is due even at zero.

The accommodation tax period is each month of the calendar year in which the business operates. Each month's tax is declared by the evening of the 26th of the following month and paid within the same period, under Article 34 of the Expenditure Taxes Law No. 6802 (opens in a new tab) (mevzuat.gov.tr, consolidated text). The return goes to the tax office the taxpayer is attached to for VAT. A taxpayer with no VAT liability files with the tax office where the facility is located.

The tourism share return is filed electronically, monthly for corporate taxpayers and quarterly for everyone else, and must reach the tax office by 23:59 on the last day of the month after the period, under the Tourism Share Return General Communiqué, Serial No. 1 (opens in a new tab) (Resmî Gazete, 2 November 2019). A return is still required when there were no net sales or rental income: the filer ticks the box meaning "there is no tourism share to declare". VAT and withholding follow the taxpayer's registration and the transactions of the period, not the season, so a month without sales is still a month in the filing calendar.

Where the text is not plain, the nil-return decision belongs to your accountant. Get it in writing before the season ends, so the answer does not depend on who is at the desk in February. For the operating months themselves, the accommodation tax return month-end checklist covers the details.

What does the Ministry file say about your closed months?#

Your certification file states the periods the facility is open and closed, so the closed season is a declared fact rather than an assumption.

Certification applications are made through e-Devlet, and paper applications made outside e-Devlet are returned without being assessed, under the Regulation on the Qualifications of Tourism Facilities (opens in a new tab) (Presidential Decision 1134, consolidated to 31 August 2026). The document list for a direct tourism operation certificate application includes the periods the facility is open and closed, alongside identity or trade registry details, the UETS electronic notification address, capacity and class declarations, and the workplace opening and operating licence.

If your season shifts, the file and the reality should match. Keep a copy of what you declared and the date you declared it. For facilities that carry a class, other than one-, two- and three-star hotels, a certification board of at least two controllers inspects on site using a points-based evaluation form; one- to three-star hotels and unclassified facilities are evaluated by inspection. If an inspection finds only missing documents, a one-time 30-day period is given to complete them, and that clock does not care whether the season has started.

The point for a closed hotel: an inspector arriving in a closed month should find a file that predicted the closure, with the dates already written down.

Does reporting to the central tourism database stop when the hotel closes?#

The duty belongs to the facility, not to the guest count, so a closed month is a question to settle with the agency rather than to assume away.

Ministry circular 2026/1, dated 16 April 2026, obliges accommodation facilities and their software providers to send data to the central tourism database through a web-service connection: daily if the transfer is automatic, monthly by the 15th if it is manual. TGA's integration information page (opens in a new tab) (last updated 26 June 2026) describes a different rhythm: all data is received on a monthly basis, each month's data sent once by the 10th of the following month, with a one-time bulk submission covering January 2025 to April 2026 expected at the start.

The specific data fields required for submission are defined by TGA. Confirm the required data format and content with your software provider or with TGA. Penalties and scope are not settled in the material available to us: confirm them with TGA or your adviser in writing.

Two official descriptions of the same duty disagree on cadence. Ask TGA or your software provider which one applies to your facility, and keep the answer in writing. Ask the same question about closed months specifically: what a facility with no guests is expected to send for a month in which it did not operate. The background to the circular is in our article on Circular 2026/1 and reporting to Türkiye's central tourism database.

What happens to KBS and fiscal devices while the doors are shut?#

No guests means no guest notifications, but the access, the device and the account stay yours to manage.

KBS, the guest identity notification system, is a legal duty of every lodging facility and is triggered by a stay. With no stays there is nothing to send. Keep the account and its credentials alive through the closed months, because the first check-in of the season is the wrong moment to discover that nobody remembers who holds the login.

Deadlines counted in hours, current fine amounts and which law enforcement body receives a given facility's notifications are not settled in public sources. Ask the authority and your adviser rather than working from memory. Fiscal devices (ÖKC, the yazar kasa) are a matter to agree with your accountant and the device service at closure, recording what was done and on which date. Electronic documents are issued through a licensed integrator; if you issue none during the closed months, confirm with the integrator that the account and any pending documents are settled before you stop watching them.

One rule covers all of it: nothing gets switched off without a named person and a date.

Which staff duties end with the season?#

Employment duties end when the employment relationship ends, not when the season does, and the exit notification is the record that fixes the date.

Every departure is notified to SGK with an exit code. The code carries meaning for the employee's later claims, so it is not an administrative afterthought. Get the code right at the time of exit: correcting a wrong code afterwards is a separate process with its own route, and it is not something to reconstruct from memory. Confirm the procedure with your accountant or payroll adviser.

Final pay, unused leave and any notice period are settled at the exit, not carried into the spring. Keep the exit notification, the final payslip and the signed settlement in one folder per person, so a question in eighteen months has a single place to look. The same sheet that lists tax duties should list who left and on what date, because two lists that disagree are worse than one list that is incomplete. On the hiring side, the reopening calendar for the last four weeks before the first guest starts weeks before the season does.

What belongs on one sheet for the last week of the season?#

One sheet with five columns: duty, trigger, what closure changes, owner, evidence.

The rows are the accommodation tax, tourism share, VAT, withholding and SGK exits, the Ministry file, central database reporting, KBS access, the fiscal device and the e-document account. Write the next date for each row, not the word "monthly": a date can be checked, an interval cannot. The evidence column holds the receipt, the confirmation email or the filed return, and if a row has no evidence, it has not been done.

Review the sheet with your accountant before the last guest leaves, not after, because the people who can answer are still on site in the last week. Keep the finished sheet with the season's files; next year's version starts from it, and the questions are already written. This sheet is not a substitute for advice on your own case. It is the list you bring to that advice.

What to do next#

Before the last guest leaves, put the sheet in front of your accountant and go through it row by row: the accommodation tax months you operated, the tourism share return even at zero, the open and closed periods in your Ministry file, the reporting cadence TGA confirms for you, the KBS and device handover, and every exit notification. Each row is a date with a name next to it, and the season ends cleanly only when all of them are closed.