Registering your holiday rental: what you need in each region

Flanders: notifying Toerisme Vlaanderen

Anyone renting out a holiday home in Flanders must notify the accommodation to Toerisme Vlaanderen. That applies even if you only rent through Airbnb or Booking, and even for a single room. The notification itself is free.

There are two statuses, and the difference matters more than it looks. A NOTIFIED accommodation is registered but has never been inspected. An ACKNOWLEDGED one has been checked against the standards, including fire safety, and receives a star rating. Roughly three quarters of the Flemish register is merely notified.

You then receive a registration number, which must appear in every listing, including on your own website. We check that number for every property that goes live with us, and in September 2026 we compared our entire Flemish list against the official register.

• •notification is free and can be done online
• •the number must appear in every listing
• •acknowledgement requires a municipal fire safety certificate
• •the register is public, so anyone can verify your number

Wallonia: the BELWAL number

Wallonia works differently. Since 1 July 2025, every tourist accommodation must be registered with Tourisme Wallonie, carrying a BELWAL number. That duty comes from the new Code wallon du Tourisme and is SEPARATE from European regulation 2024/1028. Since 1 January 2026 there is no tolerance left.

The distinction matters, because people often point to Europe. The European regulation takes effect on 20 May 2026, but applying it in practice first requires an amendment to the Code wallon du Tourisme, announced for the end of 2026. The European registration duty therefore does not yet apply in Wallonia; the Walloon duty already does.

You apply through the Commissariat général au Tourisme. You will need proof of ownership or the owner's consent, along with the number of sleeping places. Here too, the number must appear in your listings.

An older permit number from a previous scheme sometimes remains valid. We came across this with several hosts: a number that did not look like a BELWAL number turned out to be an acknowledgement under the old rules. So do not discard an old number before having it checked.

Be careful with deadlines you read online. A date of 15 June 2026 circulates without any traceable source, while the Walloon duty has applied since July 2025 and the tolerance ended in January 2026. Anyone relying on that date is letting without a valid number in the meantime. Go by what Tourisme Wallonie publishes itself.

Brussels: a registration number, and what we will not claim

For the Brussels region we can say one thing with certainty: a registration number is required, and we ask for it on every Brussels property before it goes live with us. That is written into our publication procedure and a check is attached to it.

What we will NOT do is copy the rest of the Brussels rules onto this page. Other sites publish lists of planning permits, fire safety certificates and fine amounts, all stated with equal confidence. We have not verified them ourselves against an official source, and in that case they do not belong here. A host who relies on our text and picks up a fine has no use for our good intentions.

For the full Brussels rules, go to the region itself. What we do as soon as you join us is ask for your number and publish your property only once it is in. If you cannot find the right department, tell us and we will work it out together.

This approach is deliberate. This page carries only what we could verify in a source or in our own figures. Where that was not possible, we say so, rather than writing something plausible.

What we do with it

We ask for the registration number on every property that joins us, and without a number a property does not go live. Once, in September 2026, we went further: we checked all Flemish numbers in our database against the official Toerisme Vlaanderen register. Four turned out not to exist because of a typing error, three of them on properties that were already live. For Wallonia and Brussels there is no way for us today to check a number against an official register, so there we check the form and not the existence.

This is not paperwork for its own sake. A guest booking through a listing without a valid number has no protection at all, and the host carries the risk. With us, the number is visible on the property page.

If you do not have your number yet, you can still prepare your listing. It only goes live once the number is in, and we will help if the application stalls.

What we do not do is file the application for you. That is not possible: the application needs documents only the owner holds, such as proof of ownership or the owner's consent if you are renting. What we do is check that the number you give us exists and matches your address, because that is where it goes wrong in practice.

Frequently asked questions