The head of Vila Galé hotels, Jorge Rebelo de Almeida, is the sort of thoughtful entrepreneur that Portugal needs more of.
His profitable hotel business closed last year’s accounts with a 15% increase in revenue and the company aims to open five new hotels in Portugal in 2018.
The chairman says that the government now is being helpful to the industry, especially with its Revive programme that offers long leases on historic buildings that the State has tired of - mainly due to mounting maintenance bills - or does not want to see degenerate any further.
Rebelo de Almeida says the Revive move was very commendable and can help generate business, especially in the country’s interior.
Vila Galé was the first company successfully to sign up for one such property, the Convent of São Paulo, in Elvas where it is going to construct an hotel within the historic site which stands in ruins.
"Considering that Elvas was a military city, the theme of this hotel will be the Portuguese military fortifications around the world that many of us do not even know about", said the driving force of Vila Galé.
"I do not know if this hotel will be able to cover its costs in terms of profitability, because Elvas is not yet a tourist destination," but Rebelo de Almeida anyway is determined to spend in Elvas to help attract people to the interior.
"This whole tourism wave that we have ridden over the past two years can be well used, especially to promote the interior."
The Elvas Convent is one of the five hotels that the Vila Galé group has in the pipeline to open in 2018 - which also includes new units in Oporto Braga, Serra da Estrela and Sintra.
Developing the interior of the country is one of Jorge Rebelo de Almeida’s missions and creating something wonderful in Elvas, profitable or not, is part of a wider mission to drag tourist money inland.
The hotelier is not impressed with what is going in in Lisbon, with the cost of acquiring hotels rising too high, too fast.
Claiming that many such overvalued hotels can not be profitable, especially in Lisbon, Rebelo de Almeida has a long-term view, "In many of these hotels, the accounts won’t balance and with prices so inflated, someone will be picking up these assets in the next downturn.”
