Overall ranking: 49 (20)
Hotels ranking: 13 (5)
Sir Rocco Forte - Snapshot
Sir Rocco Forte is the chairman and chief executive of Rocco Forte Hotels, which he set up in 1996 shortly after losing Forte (the hospitality giant founded by his father in 1934) to a £3.87b hostile takeover by Granada. Forte has built up a collection of 11 luxury, five-star hotels in the UK, Continental Europe and Russia. All but the French property (which is managed) are company owned or joint ventures with the Bank of Scotland. A 12th hotel, the Angleterre in St Petersburg, is a four-star property that falls outside the Rocco Forte brand.
Sir Rocco Forte - Career guide
Sir Rocco Forte, who was born in Bournemouth in 1945, was exposed to all aspects of his father’s business from the age of 13. He qualified as a chartered accountant in 1969 before joining the family firm, where he rose to become chairman and chief executive of Forte.
Sir Rocco Forte founded RF Hotels after failing to buy back the Meridien hotel chain from Granada in 1996. It became Rocco Forte Hotels in 2001 when the Compass Group returned the rights to the Forte business name which it inherited from its merger with Granada in 2000. In 2005, Sir Rocco renewed old business links with Marco Pierre White to open the joint venture Luciano’s restaurant in London’s St James’s.
Sir Rocco Forte - What we think
After heading up one of the UK’s largest catering and hospitality businesses, Sir Rocco is now steering a more focused hotel group to international success. Rocco Forte Hotels has won dozens of awards for its service and for its stylish design, which is overseen by Sir Rocco’s sister, Olga Polizzi, a designer of international repute and herself the owner of two UK hotels.
At Forte, Sir Rocco was responsible for more than 800 hotels, 1,000 restaurants and nearly 100,000 employees in 50 countries. Forte transformed the business developed by his Italian immigrant father from a chain of milk bars in London’s West End into an international player on the back of the Meridien hotel chain.
At the time of the Granada takeover, the Forte empire included the Forte Posthouse, Forte Crest, Travelodge and Heritage hotel chains as well as the Welcome Break, Little Chef and Happy Eater motorway and roadside restaurant chains.
Sir Rocco Forte was knighted in 1994 for his services to tourism – he was president of the British Hospitality Association from 1991 to 1996 and served as a member of the World Travel and Tourism Council’s executive committee. In 1999 he won a Caterer and Hotelkeeper Catey Special Award for his resilience in bouncing back after the sale of the family silver and for his commitment to quality. In 2005, Sir Rocco become the first European hotelier to win a Leaders in Luxury award and, in 2006, he was inducted into the elite British Travel Industry Hall of Fame.
Rocco Forte hotels are designed to be individual with restaurants that are dining destinations in their own right – for example, Marco Pierre White created the restaurant at the Manchester Lowry hotel. The group’s hotels in Manchester and Cardiff (the first five-star hotel in Wales) are credited with helping to revitalise these cities.
The current portfolio has some echoes of the past – Forte once managed Edinburgh’s Balmoral hotel and owned Brown’s hotel in London. Sir Rocco aims to operate 20 to 25 luxury hotels in key European cities and, in 2001, he set up a £270m joint venture to expand the chain with the Bank of Scotland, which currently co-owns five properties. Openings in the pipeline include Berlin in October 2006, followed by Munich and Prague in 2007 and a golf resort and spa in Sicily in 2008.
Sir Rocco Forte’s £385m fortune ranked him 116th in the 2006 Sunday Times Rich List.
Sir Rocco Forte – Further Information
Rocco Forte Hotels profile from CatererSearch
Hospitality jobs with Rocco Forte Hotels on CatererSearch
Rocco Forte Hotels official website
Rocco Forte Hotels profile on Google Finance
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