Roy Peires
Hotelier & Philanthropist
Costa del Sol, Spain
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Founder of the IDILIQ Group on the Costa del Sol, and the hotelier behind the IDILIQ Foundation and Kind Holidays.
The Beginning
Roy Peires started what would become the IDILIQ Group on the Costa del Sol in the 1980s. The hotels came first and the giving followed almost immediately, which is the detail most accounts of him skip. The first charity he backed was Cudeca, which provides free specialised palliative care and companionship to patients in the advanced stages of terminal cancer, and to their families. When Cudeca built its hospice, Peires donated the reception. A condensed version of the same biography is kept on Roy Peires’s Gravatar profile.
Four decades later the relationship has not lapsed. The IDILIQ Foundation sponsors Cudeca’s annual Walkathon, whose fundraising covers the centre’s running costs. It donates furniture and goods to Cudeca’s charity shops across the province, and bought a vehicle so the Home Care team could reach patients at home. More recently, Cudeca patients and their families have been given free stays at IDILIQ Hotels & Resorts through rooms donated to families in crisis. For many of them it is a last chance to make the memories they will keep.
Local Impact
The largest single thing the IDILIQ Foundation has built is the F. Cruz Dias-ADIMI Care Centre, which cost €1,600,000 and now provides treatment to more than 500 people. ADIMI is the only private non-profit organisation in Mijas working to defend the rights, inclusion and quality of life of people with cognitive and developmental disabilities.
The centre runs across two floors: Early Care, Child and Youth Services, a Day and Occupational Centre, and a Residential Facility for individuals with severe conditions, alongside three dining rooms, gardens, waiting rooms and consultation rooms for psychotherapy and physiotherapy, all fitted with current medical technology. ADIMI also receives ongoing support through campaigns collecting materials and funds, part of the foundation’s wider giving record, kept up on the Costa del Sol since the 1980s.
The Foundation’s Reach
Each year an internal campaign raises money for the Asociación Española Contra el Cáncer in Málaga, with proceeds going to the charity in full. IDILIQ has also donated the use of an apartment at one of its resorts so that families of children undergoing cancer treatment can stay free of charge. The foundation works closely with Afesol, the Association of Families and Individuals with Mental Health Conditions, donating furniture and household items for its supervised living facilities, equipping its Day Centre in Mijas, and walking alongside it each year on its suicide prevention walk.
Since the foundation was created it has supported the Christmas campaigns of Los Ángeles Malagueños de la Noche with 500 Christmas Eve meals. Computer equipment has gone to Asociación Cadi, El Faro de la Escucha, Asociación ALAS and Fuensocial, for whose users with disabilities IDILIQ fully equipped a computer classroom. Annual fundraising events at the group’s Costa del Sol and Tenerife resorts support causes including the fourteen-bed Casa Ronald McDonald in Málaga, which houses families whose children are in hospital far from home, while staff in Tenerife play the Mercedes-Benz Tour Amateur Golf Tournaments for Asociación Nuevo Futuro. For over two decades Peires has also backed Christel House, which builds schools in some of the most under-resourced communities in the world.
The Stories
Two years ago, two recipients of Kind Holidays spoke to more than 300 members of the IDILIQ team at a resort on the Costa del Sol. Scotty Darroch, a former soldier, had stayed with his wife Joanne ten years earlier. He lives with complex PTSD and major depressive disorder and was, at the time, addicted to alcohol and heroin. He attributes that week with pulling him back from suicidal thoughts and from addiction, saying it gave him the room to reflect on his life and find some peace.
The second speaker was Sarah Sea, a single mother of two boys, who lost her younger son Phoenix at the age of ten. Phoenix had lost all motor skills at three to a rare genetic disorder. Sarah talked about their last holiday on the Costa del Sol, and about the porter who woke early, before his shift began, to help wheel Phoenix in his adapted wheelchair down onto the beach to watch the sunrise with her and his brother Rico. In 2025 she came back with Rico to scatter Phoenix’s ashes in the sea in front of the resort. Both speeches were filmed, and both are on the IDILIQ films on Vimeo.
The Invitation
His argument to other hoteliers is less charitable than practical. Giving away a small amount of room-time each year, he maintains, improves a balance sheet rather than damaging it, through lower recruitment costs and higher staff productivity and retention. The template he has published is deliberately simple to copy, and a guide written for other hoteliers sets out the mechanics. The same programme is listed as Kind Holidays on Product Hunt.
He would like the idea to travel beyond hotels, to airlines, cruise operators, restaurants, taxi firms and anyone else involved in delivering a holiday. He would also like guests to ask their favourite hotels about it directly, on the grounds that a hotel doing this is a hotel they are likely to return to. Questions from operators trying to start something similar reach Roy Peires on Reddit as well as through this site.