It’s all in the details at Rocco Forte’s luxury hotels

WHEN Rocco Forte sold his father’s hotel empire he re-entered the business he had known all his life but at the luxury end of the market

Sir Rocco Forte finds the hotel business exciting because hotels are “living things”

ROCCO Forte, owner of 11 luxury hotels — including Brown’s Hotel in London, the Hotel de Russie in Rome and the Hotel Savoy in Florence — says he knows the hotel business back to front.

As the scion of one of Britain’s most successful hotel barons — the late Lord Charles Forte — he learned the business from the ground up. And his youthful stints in the laundry and kitchen, he says, are key to his success.

“You know, the great engineering companies were built by people who were engineers; they were built by people who made the products, the cars for example, themselves,” says Sir Rocco. “I’m not saying it’s the only way and that you have to do that, but you have to have an understanding of what the business is about; otherwise, you’re reliant on other people to tell you and they can bullshit you for years before you’ve found out. I think it’s important to have a grasp on the different aspects to the business. I’ve worked in every department and, you know, I think I didn’t actually do enough. I wish I’d done more, actually, particularly in the kitchen.

“In our industry, effectively, the lowest-paid employees are the ones that are in front of the customer the most. Which is why whenever I go into a hotel I make a point of talking to the chambermaids because they’re usually treated like shit and because they’re the ones who know what the guests want, what they don’t like and what they’re complaining about. As you move up the executive line, you’re not interacting with the customers. There is so much detail in looking after the customer well. The service that a customer gets is made up of a lot of little things coming together.”

After a lifetime in the hotel business, Sir Rocco is still all about the small details, which might explain why he thinks there is a natural size to his hotel group. “I think we can handle 20 to 25 hotels. I don’t think we want to be much bigger than that; otherwise, we won’t be able to keep the same feel,” says Sir Rocco with remarkable frankness. He is softly spoken and looks much younger than his 69 years, a byproduct perhaps of being a keen sportsman. He plays golf, rides a bike and regularly competes in triathlons.

His father, Lord Forte, was born in Mortale in Italy and emigrated to Scotland at the age of four. The elder Forte started his career in the hospitality industry in 1935 by opening a milk bar in Regent Street in London. By the time his son was born, in Bournemouth in southwest England in 1945, his father was well on the way to establishing his fortune. His company, known from 1979 as Trusthouse Forte, owned motorway service stations and catered for Heathrow Airport, owned the Crest, Travelodge and Posthouse hotel brands and had stakes in the Savoy Hotel in London, the George V in Paris and the Plaza Athenee in New York. At one point, Trusthouse Forte had 100,000 employees in 50 countries. In the early 1990s, it was rebranded as the Forte Hotel Group and in 1993 Sir Rocco, the eldest of six children and the only son, assumed full control of the business. Then in 1996 it was the subject of a hostile 3.7 billion takeover by Granada, which left the family with 350 million in cash.

After the takeover, Sir Rocco set about establishing his own group of hotels, initially known as RF Hotels, at the luxury end of the market. He started by buying the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh and Brown’s Hotel in London. In 2001 after the demerger of Compass from Granada’s media assets, the use of the Forte trademark was returned to Forte and his company was renamed Rocco Forte Hotels. It remains a family business with Sir Rocco’s sister, Olga Polizzi, designing the interiors of the hotels and his three children, two daughters and a son, involved in various roles. “I wouldn’t force anyone to come into the business if they didn’t want to, but if they [family members] do want to, then it’s very exciting for me,” he says.

After the Granada takeover, Sir Rocco and his family were flush with funds and he could have done anything — or nothing — but he chose to get back into the hotel game. “Well, it’s something that I’ve grown up with and something that I instinctively know,” he says. “Hotels are something which are alive, they’re a living thing. It’s not like you’re building an office block and then letting it out, because once you’ve built the hotel it’s only the beginning; you’ve got to create the life in it and the atmosphere and to get the staff motivated. And that’s very exciting to me.

“I sometimes sit in the de Russie in Rome in the garden and think, you know, 15 years ago this hotel didn’t exist and no one had thought of turning this building into a hotel.

You get a very satisfying feeling from something like that.”

(The building the de Russie occupies was once the Roman refuge of the Russian imperial family as well as being the pied-a-terre of Diaghilev from the Ballets Russes and the dancer Nijinsky — hence the hotel’s name. The building lay derelict from 1993 until it was reopened in 2000). Sir Rocco, however, is quick to point out that despite the joy and satisfaction brought by the creation of a hotel it is nevertheless a highly competitive and difficult business.

Rocco Forte’s collection of hotels is based entirely in Europe. It includes the Hotel Astoria in St Petersburg, the Hotel de Rome in Berlin, Verdura Golf and Spa Resort in Sicily, The Balmoral in Edinburgh and The Charles Hotel in Munich. There is one city, however, he has yet to crack and the one he covets most: Paris. It’s also, he says, one of the most competitive hotel markets in the world.

“Paris is very difficult because it’s so expensive to get in there,” he says, referring to the high cost of Paris real estate.

“I looked at the site that the Mandarin Oriental is on but I didn’t want to pay the rent they were asking. Location is important and if you’re in the wrong location you will never attract a certain clientele. Sometimes I toy with the idea of opening on the Left Bank because there is nothing there, but you’re never going to get the rates you get on the other side and the property prices at the moment are similar.”

Another European city Sir Rocco has been keen to enter is Madrid. “I’ve looked at 20 different properties there and I couldn’t see how any of them could be turned into hotels, how you could get it to work and to be comfortable and welcoming. When you walk through the front door of a hotel, you’ve got to feel like it’s somewhere you want to stay,” he says.

He has no plans to venture into Asia or Australia, although he has said he would like to open a hotel in New York. But when pressed on why an Asian opening is not on the cards, you get a sense he has not ruled it out. “Not at the moment anyway,” he says. “I don’t really have a sense of Asia at all. I’ve never really worked out there and I’ve never got a feel for it. But, you know, if I found the right partner who was from that part of the world, then I would think about it.

And, you know, if I went to Australia I would probably go to Sydney, but it’s a long way to just have one hotel.”

A sense of place is important to Sir Rocco and, he says, he doesn’t want to open hotels with a cookie-cutter approach just for the sake of being in a particular market.

“We’re not a chain and each property is unique in itself,” he says. “Each hotel relates to the place that it’s in and we should be part of the life and soul of the city. The Lowry in Manchester, for example, is a completely Manchester hotel. And in Munich the hotel there [The Charles] is big and new and feels very much like it’s part of the city.

That hotel has a lightness that I think is very typical of Munich and every time I go to there I’m surprised by it.”

When Sir Rocco stays at a hotel outside his collection, he always looks to see whether it is doing something clever that his hotels should be doing; but more often he finds things are not up to his exacting standards. That said, there are a handful of hotels that he thinks set a gold standard.

“I like the Beverley Hills Hotel in Los Angeles because it encapsulates Beverly Hills. Even when it was run-down, before it was bought by the Dorchester Group, I still liked it because of that. The Villa d’Este on Lake Como because of its fantastic location and traditions. I like hotels which give me a sense of the city they’re in and that’s what I try to do with my hotels.”