The concept behind the project is for 12 graduates to start a one-year internship during which they’ll have to develop ideas meant to bring new life to the Praia do Barril beach concessions as part of the overall goal of fighting seasonality. The idea is to offer new tourism products and services aiming toward the senior and disabled citizens.

The idea man behind the project is Antonia Almeida Pires, the general manager of the Pedras d’el Rei resort; he invited the University of the Algarve to provide some academic backup and some institutional credibility to the venture.

The hope is that the project will have a positive effect on the region’s tourism industry during the low inter season, because Barril is indeed of regeneration, so the idea is to aim the project at seniors, a much more demanding market.

The interns will be the hands-on part of the approach, while the backing entities will be offering a background network meant to facilitate contacts with other entities, funding opportunities and providing their important know-how to the effort.

Around 200 University of the Algarve graduates applied for the 12 positions, so the organizers had quite the pool to choose from, and they were looking for a wide variety of fields of expertise, ranging from landscaping and management to things like marine biology and architecture.

Considering the one-year time span of the internship, during this time the interns will be staying at the Pedras d’el Rei development for free, and will be receiving a monthly wage of around 700 Euros – it’s quite a decent deal for fresh graduates.

We’ll have to keep an eye on this project this following year and see what comes of it.

The momentum that he is referring to has to do with the fact that at least till the present time, the tourism numbers in the Algarve have been showing a positive and upward trend, and that he considers that this is reason enough for the Algarve to establish itself as an all year-round destination.

He appealed to businesses operating within the Algarve tourism industry to stay open for as long as possible because in his words, it is ‘essential’ to try and ‘keep facilities and infrastructures connected to tourism open’ during this coming winter; because that’s what is needed to start the process of reaching the goal of making the Algarve into a winter destination.

Silva continued to say that the Algarve tourism industry as a whole is working on the 2012/14 winter campaign and he said that the campaign has shown very positive results in securing about 100,000 nights to be spent in the region on top of all of those already contracted for this winter.

He stressed that the region has to affirm itself as a year-round destination and in order for this to happen, each and every public and private entity have to help create the conditions so as to reach this objective.

Mister Silva is quite uniquely experienced in the subject, having been mayor of Albufeira – one of the region’s major tourist hotspots – for a decade, and now being re-elected as the president of the RTA; he is quite aware of the seasonality aspect of the region and that’s why he is trying to change that.

We can only hope that he manages to do this for the overall good for everyone.

We tout the idea of visiting the Algarve during the winter a lot on this website because of the reduced prices, considerably smaller crowds and milder temperatures however we’ve also talked about how the tough economic times are battering the area, and today is going to be one of the latter types of articles.

Almost half of the Algarve hotels associated with the AHP have decided to suspend their activities during the low season, for at least three months – 48% to be exact.

AHP representatives have admitted that this move is going to be bad for the region as a whole and that there is definitely a seasonality trend taking place in the Algarve, which a few years back wasn’t that prevalent. On the other hand it is a clear sign that there just aren’t enough customers for all of these hotels to continue operating through the winter season.

This seasonality phenomenon is having some effects in other regions of the country as well, not only the tourist-heavy Algarve. For instance in the Alentejo region – which is just North of the Algarve – fourteen percent of their hotels shut down during the winter, while none of them did so in 2011.

This issue isn’t the only one hitting the hotel industry in the region, with a sharp drop in prices being yet another critical matter to consider.

Between January and September of 2012, the average price of a hotel room was of 40.48 Euros, while the occupancy level overall averaged at 59.39 percent.

The capital, Lisbon, stood out by far with the biggest of price drops with the average room price dropping in September by 15.77 percent.