A month ago in Le Room Service we celebrated a new business milestone with the opening of our first office outside Spain, more specifically in Lisbon.
Vaco María Barreiros, City Manager in Lisbon, shares with us the first impressions and successes of this month’s journey, as well as the next objectives.
We start with the groups Turim Hotels and Dom Carlos. In the coming weeks, we will start serving other chains such as Hotéis Fénix and 9Hotel – Mercy Hotel, thus reaching the 2,000 room mark in the first month of operation, a figure we intend to triple by September.
In addition, last week, the leading tourist information magazine in Portugal dedicated an article to Le Room Service focused on making our services known in Portugal after our recent opening in Lisbon: https://bit.ly/AMBITUR. With this communication strategy we intend to increase our brand presence in the coming weeks and, therefore, the capillarity of the hotels in which we operate.
The acceptance of our service by hoteliers has been very good, even with the Turim group, in 15 days we went from having only three hotels in the group to having 11. This shows not only that our service is really an asset for the daily operation of a hotel, but also an excellent acceptance by the end customer. It is also noteworthy that we have increased recurrence, as a percentage of customers have made several requests throughout their stay in the hotels where we are present, and as expected, the most requested products are our burgers, club sandwich and Caesar salad.
With the end of the restrictions, the tourism market in Portugal is finally recovering and the number of guests and overnight stays grew by 1.6% and 1.1% respectively when compared to 2019, according to INE data. In this sense, we are very optimistic about our growth in the coming months.
Setting Liboa as an initial target was inevitably driven by the expected growth in the number of hotels and rental flats in the short term, coupled with the fact that the city is relatively small, which increases its density and our business capillarity. Last but not least, according to a study by Money.co.uk , Lisbon was considered the second best city for five-star tourism.
This casuistry made us strategically choose Rua Rodrigo da Fonseca as our headquarters, because it allowed us to be located within the delivery radius of most of the hotels we operate with, guaranteeing our seal of quality.
Portugal, according to a study by Forbes Advisor, is the third safest country in Europe to visit this summer, behind only Switzerland and Slovenia.
Another significant fact, to focus our efforts on the Portuguese market, is that the Portuguese budget for this summer’s holiday is 1543 euros, which represents an increase of 15% compared to 2021, according to data from Europ Assistance’s 21st Annual Summer Holiday Barometer, carried out in collaboration with IPSOS. According to the document, 79% of Portuguese people plan to travel during the summer months, an increase of 17 percentage points compared to the previous year. As in 2021, the Portuguese continue to opt for domestic tourism – around 54%, an increase of 8 points compared to the previous year. For the Portuguese, the hotel (41%) or a rented house (30%) are the most sought-after types of accommodation.
Our strategy, in a first phase, is to attract as many three- and four-star hotels as possible, so that our partners have a valid room service option for their clients, without risking financial losses. In a second phase, we will extend our opening hours to 24 hours a day, and then we will also try to attract five-star hotels.
Reader Interactions