The hospitality sector has long engaged in charitable giving — sponsoring local events, supporting food banks, and making seasonal donations. These contributions matter. But they rarely leverage what hotels uniquely possess: rooms, suites, and resort facilities that, during periods of low occupancy, sit unused.
Kind Holidays, an initiative developed through the IDILIQ Foundation by Roy Peires, is built on the premise that unused accommodation capacity represents one of the most valuable and underutilized resources the hospitality industry holds. When directed toward families experiencing serious illness, bereavement, or military trauma, that capacity becomes something categorically different from a standard charitable donation.
The Operational Logic
Kind Holidays does not require hotels to operate outside their existing infrastructure. The program is designed to work within standard operations — identifying periods of lower occupancy and allocating a defined number of rooms or suites to charity partners who have pre-vetted recipients.
Charity partners manage the selection and coordination of families. IDILIQ Hotels & Resorts provide the accommodation. The operational burden on the hotel is minimal. The impact on the families involved is not.
Since 2012, the initiative has provided complimentary stays to more than 2,300 individuals across more than a dozen charity partnerships. Partner organizations have included Give Us Time, which supports military personnel and their families; children’s hospices and bereavement charities; the Carers Trust, founded by Princess Anne; and palliative care organizations including Cudeca on the Costa del Sol.
Why Unused Capacity Is the Right Asset
For most hotels, an unsold room represents lost revenue — but only partially. The marginal cost of accommodating a family through a charitable program, during a period that would otherwise register as vacancy, is significantly lower than the headline room rate suggests. Housekeeping, utilities, and minor food and beverage considerations are the primary incremental costs.
Against those costs, hotels gain several things: staff engagement, reputational value, charity sector relationships, and the organizational identity that comes with operating a program that staff describe as one of the most meaningful parts of their work.
IDILIQ’s experience has documented a consistent secondary effect: team members who interact with program participants report heightened engagement and a stronger sense of professional purpose. That outcome has direct implications for staff retention and culture — metrics that carry financial weight in an industry where turnover is a persistent operational challenge.
A Replicable Template
One of the explicit goals of Kind Holidays, from its inception, has been replicability. Roy Peires has publicly encouraged hotels of all sizes — from resort operators to city-center properties located near major children’s hospitals — to consider how the model could apply to their specific context.
City-center hotels near large pediatric hospitals, for example, are positioned to support families who cannot commute from home during a child’s extended treatment. Resort properties can serve families who need a period of rest and restoration during or after a period of medical crisis. The application varies by property type; the underlying structure remains consistent.
The Kind Holidays website at www.kindholidays.com provides a practical guide for hotel operators interested in establishing their own programs. It includes documentation on program setup, charity partner contacts actively seeking accommodation partnerships in the UK and abroad, and examples from IDILIQ’s own operational experience.
Broadening the Conversation Beyond Hotels
Roy Peires has framed Kind Holidays not only as a hotel initiative, but as a challenge to the wider travel and hospitality sector. Airlines, cruise operators, restaurants, taxi and transfer companies, and other businesses involved in the delivery of holidays are, in his view, equally positioned to contribute.
The logic is consistent across each sector: periods of underutilized capacity, directed toward verified charitable need, create outcomes that neither a financial donation nor a standard marketing campaign can replicate.
A Benchmark for Purposeful Operations
Kind Holidays is now more than a decade into its operation. Its longevity, and the consistency with which it has expanded its charity partnerships, makes it one of the more substantive examples of structured charitable programming within the European hospitality sector.
For hotel operators evaluating how to align their CSR commitments with something that has measurable, documented impact — rather than seasonal optics — the Kind Holidays model offers a clear and well-tested starting point.
About Roy Peires
Roy Peires is the founder of what became the IDILIQ Group and has led the IDILIQ Foundation’s charitable programs across southern Spain and internationally for several decades. Kind Holidays, launched in 2012, is one of the foundation’s flagship initiatives, providing complimentary accommodation to families facing serious illness, bereavement, and military trauma. More information is available at www.kindholidays.com.
