Sir Rocco Forte’s secrets of success in the hotel business

IT all comes down to getting the small details right, the hotel scion tells WISH.

Stylists prepare the model for this month's fashion spread. Picture: Jarrod Harrison

THERE’S a story I’ve heard, with a few variations in plot, from a couple of London-based friends.

It goes something like this: The wife of a well-known Russian oligarch decided that she wanted a hobby and the hobby she wanted was a London hotel. The oligarch agreed to buy her one if she first learned the hotel business from the ground up. So the wife of the Russian oligarch, who no doubt had homes around the world, a yacht, a private jet and more handbags than you can wave a crocodile at, got herself a job in one of London’s storied hotels. She worked as a cleaner, she worked in the laundry and eventually progressed to working at the check-in desk.

All the while no one — neither the guests nor her co-workers had any idea of her true background.

I have no idea if she ever got her London hotel, or whether or not the story is true, and either way it’s almost irrelevant. The story highlights something that London-based hotelier Sir Rocco Forte told me in an interview for this month’s issue. To understand how to run a hotel properly and to offer your guests the best service, you need to know how every part of it works. Sir Rocco is the owner of 11 hotels around the world including Brown’s in London, Hotel de Russie in Rome and Hotel Savoy in Florence. He started in the family business (his father Charles Forte was the founder of the hotel and catering company Trusthouse Forte which at one time owned a stake in London’s Savoy Hotel, among many other businesses) as a teenager working in various roles during holidays from university. He says the experience taught him how to create a great hotel.

“Once you’ve built the hotel, it’s only the beginning,” he says. “You’ve got to create the life in it and the atmosphere and to get the staff motivated in the right way and that’s something that’s very exciting to me.

“The fun of hotels is not just the bigger picture, it’s also getting involved in the detail and giving your input on what is happening in the properties.”

When it comes to customer service, it’s the details that make something special. No one will recommend a shop, a hotel or restaurant because its share price is healthy or has a good management team. What people will comment on, however, is the small stuff such as the pillows, the staff remembering their name or being made welcome and comfortable. The details will make or break a business and, in Forte’s case, they have made it. His collection of hotels has won countless awards and given him a fortune estimated to be about 250 million (about $450m).

Detail of a different kind is the theme of another story in this month’s issue. Late last year, The Australian’s fashion editor, Glynis Traill-Nash, was one of about 200 journalists from around the world who were flown to Dallas, Texas, for a Chanel fashion show. (If you want to know why a house so identified with Paris had upped camp to Dallas of all places, read Glynis’s story). The point of the Dallas event was for Chanel to showcase its Metiers d’Art collection. In recent years Chanel has been buying up small Paris ateliers, such as the famous embroidery house Lesage.

It’s a fascinating example of how a billion-dollar company is preserving handicrafts that were under threat of extinction and maintaining supply at the same time. For Chanel its success is also aligned to the details in its coveted garments.

We hope you enjoy the issue.

David Meagher

Editor