The Record of a Visit

The border file

The passport stamp is gone. On 10 April 2026 the European Union’s Entry/Exit System became fully operational at every external Schengen border, after a phased introduction that began on 12 October 2025. It covers non-EU nationals travelling for a short stay into any of the 29 participating countries, Greece among them.

The system registers a set of details, not a stamp: the traveller’s name and travel document details, a facial image, fingerprints, and the date and place of every entry and every exit. It registers refusals of entry too.

The purpose is counting. A person had to read and count stamps, while a digital file counts itself. That is how the system detects an overstay automatically. For a traveller who makes several short stays in Europe in a year, the border now keeps the 90-day count instead of the traveller.

Two consequences follow for anyone arriving by private aircraft or by yacht. First, registration happens at the first external border crossing, wherever that falls. A traveller who enters through another participating country and then flies on to Greece enrols there. Second, the first enrolment takes longer than a stamp did, and later crossings take less time.

ETIAS, the travel authorisation meant to sit alongside the system, has no confirmed start date. The last public target was the final quarter of 2026, and the European Union removed that target from its own pages in July 2026. The date to work to is the one published at the time of travel, not a date read a year earlier.

The guest register

Every tourist accommodation in Greece keeps a register of who stayed in it. The rule covers all of them, not only the smart or the large ones, and it includes a rented villa and a room in a private house.

The obligation is set out in Police Order 8/1999, amended on the registration cards by Police Order 8A/2003. The manager of the accommodation records the details of each guest (Greek nationals, other EU nationals and everybody else), together with the arrival, the stay and the departure. The register may be kept on paper or electronically. The local police authority may inspect it, which is the point of it.

The stated purposes are the prevention and investigation of crime, the orderly running of the accommodation, and the safety of guests. In practice a hotel or a house manager takes a copy of the identity page, records it and hands the document back. The obligation does not include keeping a guest’s passport, and nothing authorises it.

Short-term rentals also send a separate declaration to AADE, the Greek revenue authority. It is a tax filing, not a police one, and it runs alongside the register, so one stay creates two filings with two recipients.

The charter file

A yacht taking paying guests in Greek waters creates the most detailed record of the three, and it creates it before the boat moves.

Chartering is licensed under the framework in Law 4926/2022. The charter agreement itself is filed electronically on the e-Charter platform run by AADE. The filing carries the vessel, the contracting parties, the intended route and the passenger list, and customs can see it in real time.

Two operating rules follow, and both surprise a charterer who expects a private boat to be private in the administrative sense as well.

• The passenger list a yacht clears into Greece on must be identical to the one it clears out on. Guests cannot be added at a quay.
• A change of more than 75% of the guests named on the agreement cancels the agreement.

The yacht clears with the port authority and customs again at each arrival and departure, and declares its next destination on leaving a port. The crew list sits with the port police alongside the ship’s papers.

None of this is unusual by the standards of commercial shipping. It is unusual compared with what most people imagine a private week on the water involves. A party that plans to swap guests during a charter should know the limit before the itinerary is written, not at the harbour office.

Who may read what, and for how long

Three different authorities hold the three files, and none of them can see the others. The border file is a European system, consulted by border, immigration and law enforcement authorities. The guest register is Greek, and the police read it. The charter filing is Greek, and customs and the port authority read it.

All three hold personal data, so the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the EU’s data protection law, applies. In Greece Law 4624/2019 supplements it, and the Hellenic Data Protection Authority enforces it. The rights that follow, such as knowing what is held and having an error corrected, are exercised against each holder separately, because there is no single record and no single custodian.

What this changes in practice

Little changes for a traveller who expects it, which is why it is set out here.

Three arms of the state document the itinerary of a visit to Greece at three points, lawfully and for stated purposes. The records are now digital where they used to be a stamp and a paper ledger. A party that wants discretion should understand where discretion lies: in who else is told (the restaurant, the driver, the crew’s own accounts of their week). What the state holds is not optional and not negotiable.