At the hotel desk,
check-in, the room, housekeeping, and the polite art of complaining

Hotel reception is the one place on the trip where register matters more than vocabulary. The words for "room" and "key" are trivial; the difference between a guest who gets bumped to the noisy room over the bar and one who gets the quiet courtyard room is almost entirely tone. In all three countries the front desk runs on the formal pronoun — Castilian <strong>usted</strong>, Catalan <strong>vostè</strong>, European Portuguese <strong>você</strong> (often just dropped, with the verb carrying the formality). You do not <em>tutear</em> the receptionist, and they will not tutear you. Reaching for <em>tú</em> at a Spanish front desk reads the way "hey buddy" would at a London hotel.

The check-in itself is near-identical procedure across the three: passport or ID, a registration card, and — in Spain and Portugal both — a legal requirement that the hotel record your document. This is the <em>parte de viajero</em> in Spain (a police-registration form, no longer always paper but still logged), and the equivalent <em>boletim de alojamento</em> in Portugal, reported to SEF/the immigration authority. Don't be surprised when they photograph your passport; it's the law, not nosiness. Catalonia adds a tourist tax (<em>taxa turística</em>) charged per night, collected at checkout — it'll be a few euros a night and is not a scam.

The key verbs of the desk are <strong>reservar</strong> (to book), <strong>alojarse</strong> / <strong>allotjar-se</strong> / <strong>ficar hospedado</strong> (to stay/lodge), and the all-important conditional of politeness. "I'd like" — <em>querría / quisiera</em> in Spanish, <em>voldria</em> in Catalan, <em>queria / gostaria</em> in Portuguese — is the single most useful structure for the whole hospitality week. <em>Quiero una habitación</em> ("I want a room") is grammatically fine and socially blunt; <em>Querría una habitación</em> ("I would like a room") is what an adult says. Lead with the conditional and you've won the register before you finish the sentence.

Complaining is where Anglophones panic, because the instinct is to over-apologize or to go straight to anger. The Iberian move is the soft frame: name the problem as a neutral fact, then ask for the remedy as a favor. <em>El aire acondicionado no funciona, ¿podrían arreglarlo?</em> — "The A/C doesn't work, could you fix it?" — not "Your A/C is broken and I'm not happy." The conditional <em>podrían / podrien / poderiam</em> ("could you") does the diplomatic work. Housekeeping vocabulary — towels, sheets, the do-not-disturb sign — rounds out the week, but the register essay is the load-bearing part: get the <em>usted</em> + conditional habit and everything else is just nouns.