Mission
ALEA was created with the aim of involving, representing, and obviously protecting, the players in the non-hotel sector, whether they are Family and Professional Bed and Breakfasts, room rentals, holiday homes, tourist residences, holiday homes and apartments, scattered hotels, non-hotel period residences, and any other tourist accommodation facility that has elements that can be linked to one or more of the previous categories in possession of the requirements provided for including the Code Structure identifier present throughout Salento.
In an attempt to respond to the needs and opportunities that non-hotel accommodation activities have to deal with on a daily basis, ALEA offers members tools for comparison, growth, representation and promotion.
The primary objective is to raise awareness in the sector, services and accommodation facilities, responsible for hospitality, to an efficiency of “doing tourism” and to do it together.
To achieve the quality that every operator dreams of for their business, we aim to eliminate a sense of unnecessary and counterproductive competition, by virtue of the conquest of an important identity and representativeness in the local area, counting on everyone’s participation.
We love tourism, let’s do it together,
this is what ALEA sees for the future of its members.
History
The ALEA Lecce Association, present both in Lecce and in other municipalities of the Province, is the result of the strong desire of owners and managers of non-hotel accommodation facilities to promote and enhance the culture of “doing tourism”.
ALEA Lecce was born in a dark period of modern human history. We are in April 2020, in full lockdown due to the spread of the COVID-19 virus, when Raffaele Bitetti, then first president of ALEA Lecce, founded a Facebook group dedicated to operators in the non-hotel accommodation sector.
The aim is a healthy comparison, but also mutual comfort, with respect to the great problems of tourism, at a time when it seemed that the sector could no longer recover. With the support of Marco Lorusso, Andrea De Carlo, Geltrude Guido and Flavio Greco, then the first members of the first Board of Directors of the Association, the foundations are laid to optimize the debate, vision and experience in the sector acquired in the field for several years.
“Creativity is born from anguish as the day is born from the dark night. It is in the crisis that inventiveness, discoveries and great strategies arise”, Einstein argued; ALEA Lecce was proof of this.
In just a few weeks, the Facebook group, dedicated to the non-hotel facilities in the city of Lecce, became very large; There were already over 200 online members who already shared topics and doubts in the first weeks of “social” aggregation. We arrive full of enthusiasm in mid-June 2020 when the group is transformed and ALEA Lecce is born, after less than three months of online messaging, and without even an official live meeting. In the first week, the number of official members already reached 50 units, and by the end of July the members became more than 100.
A short story that of ALEA Lecce but destined for a long life; and since it has little history, the Association looks a lot to the future, with the increasingly shared goal of tourism together.
ALEA Lecce begins to look beyond the territory, and together with other similar associations in the Provinces of Brindisi, Polignano a Mare, Fasano, Barletta and the Valle D’Itria area, the union of the Apulian Associations of managers of non-hotel accommodation facilities – “AEP” – is born. To date it has 11 provinces with the addition of Conversano, Margherita di Savoia, Giovinazzo, Trani, Mola di Bari
And it doesn’t end there, because a few months later, we are catapulted into another beautiful national project, which brings together over 40 twin associations scattered in every region of Italy. Thus was born the first National Federation of Non-Hotel Associations in Italy – “FARE”.
