Many X-ray accreting pulsars have a soft excess below 10 keV. This feature has been detected also in faint sources and at low luminosity levels, suggesting that it is an ubiquitous phenomenon. In the case of the high luminosity pulsars (Lx > 10^36 erg/s), the fit of this component with thermal emission models usually provides low temperatures (kT a few hundred km); for this reason, it is referred to as a `soft' excess. On the other hand, we recently found that in persistent, low-luminosity (Lx ~ 10^34 erg/s) and long-period (P > 100 s) Be accreting pulsars the observed excess can be modeled with a rather hot (kT > 1 keV) blackbody component of small area (R