Government announces €50M package for hotel real estate assets

Portugal’s minister of economy announced on Thursday in Fatima that the government would launch a programme worth €50 million to help tourism companies rehabilitate real estate assets.

António Costa Silva was speaking at the 33rd National Congress of Hotels and Tourism, promoted by AHP, which is being held in Fatima.

The minister said that “this announcement will come out today, and it will be essential” to help tourism companies “to modernise and develop” their properties, enabling “sale and leaseback,” a transaction in which a company sells its property and then rents it back.

Earlier, the president of the Associação da Hotelaria de Portugal (AHP), Bernardo Trindade, which promotes the congress, stressed that 2022 “has been exceptional” in the recovery of confidence, but that “realistically” tourism, the key to economic recovery, still needs to be helped.

The official recalled that – even to beat revenue records in 2022 – the war in Ukraine brought “such a degree of uncertainty in the construction of the tourism value chain” that it is impossible to say “what level of results” will close this year. In addition, “everything is more expensive”, from the cost of labour, to electricity and gas, the food chain and various services. These factors mean that the outlook remains “uncertain”, he said.

Trindade warned that extending the maturities of credit lines was necessary to support Covid-19, which in many cases, were now coming to an end.

Regarding the €3 billion package of support for businesses to cope with the increase in electricity and gas bills that the prime minister, António Costa, announced, Bernardo Trindade said that AHP expects that they will be “included in that aid package”.