Patricia Correia Palacio de Tavira, Portugal

My name is Patricia Correia. I'm the general manager at the Palácio, and this is a beautiful building. It's a historical building. It used to belong to the Tavares family. So it used to have the name Palácio Tavares, but now it's Palácio de Tavira, and it's comprised of two different parts.

So the first part is the Palácio area, which underwent a very good rehabilitation and remodeling of the actual Palácio rooms, and then we built a medina inspired by the Arabic traditions and roots that we all have in the Algarve.

So, regarding our website, I've been having such beautiful feedback. Of course, we all love it, but I'm getting feedback from outsiders, from our guests, and everybody that actually visits, because it's very beautifully done. It's quite typical and traditional, but very modern and very user-oriented. And the imagery is, of course—it actually helps that the property is very beautiful, but the way you positioned everything is quite beautiful. And also, it is our best-selling channel at the moment. So it's the channel that is generating the most revenue and the most bookings.

We are living in exciting times at the Palácio because we just opened and it was really perfect. I have a wonderful team, so I was not doubting anything, but we opened on time, which is actually very rare, and we got to welcome our first guests with an open heart and with a very beautiful Palácio.

The Palácio is quite a different hotel because it has these historical roots, and we can actually understand that, because there are many aspects of the original place that we still have and that we kept. For instance, the stairs of the Palácio are from the 18th century. We have many original stones. So, it has quite a very historical ambiance. We didn't just try; we managed to coordinate that with a sort of tranquility, combined with our high-standard quality of service, of course. So it's a very different place where guests can actually feel that they are in a very historical place, but without losing all the modern amenities of today's hospitality world.

So at the Palácio, everybody is very, very welcome, of course, but if we analyze the infrastructure as it is, I would say it would cater more to families because we have very beautiful rooms and big rooms, like the one that we are in at the moment. But also couples—couples that wish to come and enjoy the tradition of Tavira, which is for me a very integral part of the unspoiled Algarve.

This is all very typical. We can still walk around in the streets and find people doing things, like artisans painting the tiles. We can actually speak to local people and they will teach you how to fish, or how to cook the fish you just caught, and it's a very, very beautiful city.

So our guests should bring a lot of curiosity because this is a truly unbelievable place. Merci beaucoup to all the team at Influence Society.

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