Where we come from

We started our carriers as social entrepreneurs in Italy and Sweden by setting up social coops as a way to self-help, to exit from prisons or marginalization.
Thanks to a European project founded by ESF, European Social Found, inside the programme Equal we had the chance to develop the idea Le Mat together and our hospitality business format Le Mat.

We started by distilling a good and sustainable practice in Trieste (Italy).
Il posto delle fragole (strawberry fields), a cooperative composed of young psychiatric patients, artists, drug addicts, physicians and sympathisers, was set up in 1979. The Il posto delle fragole www.ilpostodellefragole.coop bar-cum-trattoria in a part of the dismantled Trieste Mental Hospital arose from the common desire to make music, socialise, perform, be enterprising and earn money, and also to make some use of the old hospital's many buildings and its park. Social entrepreneurs, courageous traders, young persons engaged every day in two or even three production schedules: a service (refreshments and bar) for a nascent market (visitors to the park, now open to the public, physicians, patients, workmen, artists and the people of Trieste in general) and the provision of productive employment for persons excluded from the labour market and regarded as unproductive. Parties that rendered accessible to a place of which everyone was once afraid, shows given by artists and musicians, and discussions about the need to close all mental hospitals and re-employ the spaces abandoned, projects for living and working, for excluded cultures - social marketing in today's vernacular.

The Bar, that place, became well known in Trieste, many people gathered in a former madhouse and set out to devise activities, trading and production against the anomie of a sad, nostalgic city, against the lack of employment due to the lack of entrepreneurs; there, on the borderline between two worlds out of order, unable to include.
Each new idea became a sector of activity: a transport team, a leather goods workshop, a jewellery shop. Il posto delle fragole; incubator of enterprise, bridge between society and production, cooperative of persons ready to act, to count, to experiment.

In 1985, the idea of running a hotel, a place in which to receive persons coming from afar. At Barcola, just outside of the inner town of Trieste, but outside the area of the mental health hospital, there was an old pension on the coast road: 19 rooms, 2 floors, 2 shared bathrooms and an elderly proprietor prepared to sell out for 30 million lire (approx. 15,000 euros): 30 million to buy 7000 stays a year on the part of workmen and indigent travellers; 15,000 lire (7.5 euros) per room, 27 beds to make, a small reception where the proprietor and his wife had passed their lives welcoming and building up the loyalty of their guests. The rent was paid to the local savings bank (Cassa di Risparmio di Trieste) under the terms a 6 years plus 6 years contract. Five young girls decided to learn the trade by working, cleaning and welcoming and farewelling guests around the clock and every day of the year.

From 1989 to 1991, the Pensione Tritone was completely refurnished. When it opened its doors again, it was the three-star Hotel Tritone www.tritonehotel.org : 16 bedrooms, all with private bathrooms, new furniture, excellent beds and mattresses, white-as-snow bedspreads. Five girls and a night porter, a new management faced with the repayment of a ten-year loan, the small size of the hotel and its few rooms.

Quality is (and has been) the keyword. Quality in terms of the products and services offered, and the quality of the work of the members of the enterprise.
Many work-members have come and gone over the years. The management has been renewed and the hotel has continued its successful entrepreneurial career as a source of revenue, quality employment and training. It has convinced its guests and the co-operators what a fine occupation it is that of a social hotelier.

This successful hotel is today the basis of the Le Mat hotel concept. In many locations in Italy, Le Mat hotels are now being established or already existing social hoteliers join the growing network.
Now also Sweden started to search hotels or already existing social hoteliers and so they do in UK, Germany and Spain.

Le Mat Hotel copies some of the success secrets of the girls from Trieste:
It is a mid-scale hotel, targets the mid-scale traveller and is not too expensive.
It is centrally located with good transport links but what is more important is that the management group includes people with particular experiences, such as exclusion, disabilitation, discrimination.
And last but not least the quality is oversized because of their welcoming smile especially towards people with special needs - we don’t like barriers and people with disabilities help us to abolish them!

Hotel Tritone (2003)
Bedrooms: 16
Turnover: Euro 286,401
Occupancy rate: 77%
Average room rate; Euro 63.79
REV/PAR*: Euro 49.04
Worker members: 6
Trainees: 1
* Revenue per available room: total revenue divided by the number of rooms available.