Portugal: Hotels, tourist resorts can now be used as offices, showrooms, day centres

Hotels, tourist accommodation and resorts are authorised to be used temporarily as offices, showrooms and day centres, according to a decree published in the Official Gazette.

The law published on Sunday, to amend the exceptional and temporary measures relating to the pandemic, specifies that this exceptional and temporary permit covers tourist developments, whose classification includes hotels, tourist villages, tourist flats, tourist complexes (‘resorts’), rural tourist enterprises and camping and caravan sites.

Of the exceptional measures applicable to tourist resorts, introduced by the decree-law which came into force today, the day after its publication, count the possibility of making available all or part of the accommodation units which make up these resorts for other compatible uses.

And the diploma defines these uses: extended accommodation, with or without provision of services; office and co-work spaces; meetings, exhibitions and other cultural events; ‘showrooms’; teaching and training and social rooms of day centres or other groups or organisations.

“The number of accommodation units to be made available for other uses is defined by the entities exploiting the tourist resorts”, it adds, specifying that the allocation of part or all of the accommodation units by the entities exploiting them “does not imply the loss” of the qualification as a tourist resort.

“The availability of accommodation units for other uses determines compliance with the health rules set by the Directorate General of Health, as well as other standards applicable to the activity to be developed”.

At the beginning of this month the Portuguese Hotel Association (AHP), announced that it had sent the Government a proposal for commercial uses, short or long term, of hotel accommodation, unoccupied because of Covid-19, and which already serve as student and health professionals’ accommodation.