High levels of service and personal involvement are vital to the luxury end of the hotel industry. Alastair Gilmour meets the hands-on Sir Rocco Forte. ********* What do you do when someone decides you can't use your name? For legal reasons, your business will henceforth be designated by meaningless initials or an off-the-shelf conglomeration of semi-Latin wordage. And, when the name that's denied you is Forte, the world's greatest in hotels, catering and leisure, you have a problem. In 1996, the vast Forte family empire was taken over by Granada, following a £4bn, hostile raid. It was a company founded in 1934 by Charles (Lord) Forte and stretched from luxury sites to roadside cafés and in-house catering - 800 hotels, 1,000 restaurants and 100,000 employees in 50 countries. What made it worse was that Sir Rocco Forte - only son of Sir Charles - had been its chairman and chief executive for a mere four years. The City presumed he'd dropped the ball. The Granada business was later broken up, but Forte the Younger's consolation was a cut in the estimated £325m pre-tax payoff for the family's shares; money that he ploughed back into setting up his own hotel operation, RF Hotels, created from scratch, but - nominally at least - a business stripped of its history. "RF Hotels - what the hell did that mean?" says Sir Rocco, who was knighted in 1994 for services to the UK tourism industry. "The Forte name has a history to it - people are aware of what my father did." Fortunately, he now has the name back and RF has become Rocco Forte Hotels, a 14-strong luxury collection operating in Rome, Florence, Edinburgh, Cardiff, St Petersburg, Manchester, Brussels, Beaujolais, London and Geneva, with openings due in Frankfurt, Berlin, Sicily and Munich. The Forte name guarantees attention to detail, quality and delivery of service, and that to Sir Rocco is of utmost importance. "It's quite interesting how the recognition of the company changed quite dramatically when the name changed from RF Hotels to Rocco Forte Hotels," he says. "Once I was given control of the name again, the recognition level leapt up because people knew what it was all about." Rather disconcertingly, he gazes beyond at the far wall while we chat in the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh, which was his first purchase in 1997. He scans, radar-like, and makes a mental note while we attempt to winkle out some gem or other. Perhaps there's something that shouldn't be there, but more likely a bronze statuette has caught his eye for the first time or a curtain isn't quite straight. He may simply be appreciating the stunning view of Edinburgh Castle and the Scott Monument. "Luxury hotels are all about detail and what goes into the high level of service is all about little bits of detail coming together," he says, concentration now reined in. "My reputation is built on delivering a high level of service, but it costs more. "The customer has to see value - part of that is in the decor and stylishness of the surroundings, but a much greater part is in the service and making you feel comfortable and at home, so I put a huge amount of effort into that." Sir Rocco is a keen golfer and shoots regularly in North Yorkshire. In 2001, 2002 and 2003, he represented Great Britain in his age group (he was born in 1945) at the World Triathlon Championships, most recently qualifying as the first Briton to finish. He has also run several marathons, raising significant amounts for charity. Fitness to lead and fitness to be aware and cope with high pressure are high on the Forte agenda. His father did press-ups and pull-ups every morning and rarely used the lift to his office. He is 96 this month. "Keeping fit is a challenge and I enjoy a challenge," he says. "As the business grows it becomes more difficult and a lot of people my age are looking at retirement. I'd be bored stiff. I think if you keep fit it gives you the energy to work harder. "I am demanding; to run a business you have to be. If you don't have ambitious goals and aren't ambitious to improve all the time, business starts to go backwards. "I'm not demanding in the sense that I'm after people every day; I'm demanding when I want to see results. I give people plenty of room to express themselves. What's the point of employing them and not letting them get on with it? "But, when things don't get done I want to know, so it's a combination of giving people the room and letting them know that you're on top of things and understand what's going on and that you want results. "You mustn't be afraid of taking action if it's necessary. I don't believe in the 'shooting the messenger' syndrome as you could end up not getting any messages. My instinct is that if I have a problem is not that I have a witch-hunt, it's to find a solution. I'm very objective, very positive in that respect and I tend to look forward rather than look back." Rocco Forte Hotels range from the classically refurbished to the eye-catchingly modern. The Lowry in Manchester is a wrap of steel and glass; St David's in Cardiff, with its hydrotherapy spa - a glazed, bayside pamper palace - is a blueprint for future constructions. All are luxurious but relaxed and contemporary in decor, a style co-ordinated by Sir Rocco's sister, Olga Polizzi - and staffed by the utmost in friendliness. Most important for the luxury customer is that the hotels have individual styles, taking in the traditional and the contemporary, with each one reflecting its nationality and location. Local linen fabrics and Russian antiques dominate the Astoria in St Petersburg, for example. Sir Rocco admits he wasn't too interested in design before he set up the company, but believes it is minute attention to detail that today's luxury-seeker demands. He says: "My sister, Olga, has responsibility for the decoration of all the hotels. Unlike most hotel designers, she'll go round and put little extras in a room and make it a little bit homelier than a normal hotel room. "My idea when we first started was to take over an existing hotel, tidy it up, run it better and move on to the next one. I now understand that design and attention to detail are highly important. Most luxury hotels are very stuffy and rather old-fashioned places in decoration, but we have a bit more modern style, a lighter touch, which is exactly what customers are looking for today. That's my sister's area, she taught me that. "It's a very important factor and one of the key selling points we have. Once you start looking at things and being aware of things you become conscious, so I can now interfere a bit. We have prototype rooms in new hotels that we look at, and that's the time when we'll decide if we like it. "We have a system of mystery guests who visit each hotel at least twice a year and they score them according to the standards we have set. Each hotel has 2,200 distinct operating standards, all covered in the visit. Half of the hotel general manager's bonus - 40pc of salary - is dependent on the score achieved. I believe that service is so important - so important that it's money well spent." Sir Rocco's grandfather trekked to Scotland in 1911 from Montforte, a village north of Naples, to find his fortune. His ice-cream bars (the first, the Savoy Café in Alloa, Clackmannanshire, was where he innovatively imported a soda fountain from America and a coffee machine from Italy) were developed into that world-wide business by his son Carlo (Charles), later Lord Forte of Ripley - Sir Rocco's father. "My father is a very well-liked individual," he says, "but you have to be tough to develop a big business and he had a certain way of doing things and helped a lot of people along the way, so there's a tremendous amount of goodwill surrounding the Forte name. "If I had a father who had been a complete bastard and everybody hated him, it would have been completely different. He always wanted me to succeed, but he was also very protective and didn't want me to fail, either, so in terms of giving me responsibility he was very reluctant. "In life, we have to mess up one or twice to understand how to get things right - not mess up in a serious way, but if you don't, you end up not taking any decisions. I put all my Forte money into the new business - it was like any other start-up enterprise." Rocco Forte no longer walks in his father's shadow. Having absorbed the best in his parents' characters (he says his mother is meticulous, very detailed "and a bit of a perfectionist"), he has re-emerged as a powerful business force to take notice of. It may only be a name, but you don't drop names. It's a family thing. * Visit www.roccofortehotels.com | 
