Activities

The Rocco Forte Collection owns, part owns or manages a collection of luxury, five-star hotels in key European cities. Excluding managed hotels, the properties are owned either by parent company Sir Rocco Forte & Family or by joint ventures with the Bank of Scotland called Sir Rocco Forte & Family (Luxury Hotels) and other partnerships. 

One hotel – the four-star Angleterre in Russia – falls outside the parameters of the Rocco Forte brand and operates instead under the Forte name.

The company was founded by Sir Rocco Forte in 1996 after Granada succeeded in a hostile £3.87b takeover of Forte, the vast empire created by his father in 1934 of which Sir Rocco was chairman. The new venture followed Sir Rocco’s failed £940m bid to regain the Méridien hotels, two airport Crest hotels and most of the 18 Exclusive hotels from Granada,

Because Sir Rocco lost the rights to the Forte name in 1996, the company was originally called RF Hotels, changing to Rocco Forte Hotels in 2001 and the Rocco Forte Collection in 2007.

Timeline

• 1996: Sir Rocco Forte founds RF Hotels and announces a £12m project to build the first five-star hotel in Wales, in Cardiff Bay.
• February 1997: RF Hotels buys Edinburgh’s Balmoral hotel for £35m. The hotel had been run by Forte since 1992. Under executive head chef Jeff Bland, the hotel’s Number One restaurant wins a Michelin star in 2003.
• December 1997: RF Hotels buys the Hotel Savoy in Florence which, after a later £7m revamp, reopens in 2002. It also buys the Hotel Astoria and adjoining Angleterre hotel in St Petersburg, Russia.
• January 1999: The St David’s hotel and spa opens in Cardiff Bay, Wales.
• Jan 2000: RF Hotels buys the Hotel Amigo in Brussels for £16m. In 2003 it sells the hotel to its joint venture with the Bank of Scotland.
• April 2000: RF Hotels opens the Hotel de Russie in Rome, which it bought the previous year, after a £13.5m restoration.
• April 2001: The Lowry, Manchester’s first five-star hotel, opens with a restaurant (the River Room) developed by Marco Pierre White, who worked on restaurants with Forte Hotels in the early 1990s.
• June 2001: RF Hotels forms a £270m joint venture with Uberior Investments, a subsidiary of Bank of Scotland, to build and acquire luxury hotels in European cities.
• September 2001: RF Hotels is renamed Rocco Forte Hotels after Compass, which inherited Forte’s stable of hotel brands from its merger with Granada in 2000, sells on the hotels and returns the family name to Sir Rocco.
• July 2003: The joint venture buys Brown’s hotel in London (which was owned by Forte between 1968 and 1996) from Raffles International for £51.5m. It also buys Hotel Amigo from Rocco Forte Hotels.
• October 2003: Rocco Forte Hotels signs its first management contract with the 21-bedroom, Michelin-starred Château de Bagnols near Lyons in France.
• July 2004: The joint venture buys the freehold of Le Richemond hotel in Geneva Switzerland for Sfr98.7m (£42.6m)
• March 2006: The joint-venture Villa Kennedy hotel opens in Frankfurt, Germany. 
  October 2006: The group opens the company-owned Hotel de Rome in Berlin, Germany
• December 2006: The group puts the Lowry hotel in Manchester and St David's Hotel & Spa in Cardiff on the market, with the intention of retaining long-term management contracts.
• January 2007: Von Essen Hotels buys Chateau de Bagnols in southeast France, which Rocco Forte Hotels has managed since 2003 on behalf of Lady Hamlyn, in a “double digit millions” deal.
• March 2007: The group sells the St David's hotel and spa in Cardiff to Principal Hotels for £32.5m, relinquishing its management contract in the process. It takes the Lowry off the market shortly after as all offers were for the management of the property (which the group intends to retain) as well as the building.
• October 2007: The Charles hotel, a joint venture with the Bank of Scotland, opens in Munich, Germany.

Financial snapshot

Full Year

Turnover: £93.8m (2005: £82.7m)*
Pre-tax profit: £12.9m (2005: £12.4m)

*This figure includes £17.4m (2005: £13.3m) from joint venture properties

Financial year end: 30 April 2006

Operating data

Geographical financial break-down for the year to 30 April 2006

Group turnover
UK: £24.98 (2005: £23.98m)
Western Europe: £29.2m (2005: £27.2m)
Russia: £22.2m (2005: £18.3m)

Group profit before tax and interest/share of joint venture
UK: £2.3m/-£423,000 (2005: -£350m/-£73m)
Western Europe: £5.8m/£61,000 (2005: £7.3m/-£7,000)
Russia: £5.1m (2005: £5.6m)

Number of employees: around 1,500
Number of hotels: 11

Company owned/leased hotels:
The Balmoral, Edinburgh, Scotland
Hotel Astoria, St Petersburg, Russia
Hotel de Rome, Berlin, Frankfurt
Hotel de Russie, Rome, Italy
Hotel Savoy, Florence, Italy

The four-star Angleterre hotel in St Petersburg, Russia, operates under the Forte name, not the Rocco Forte brand which is reserved for five-star properties.

Joint venture hotels:
Brown’s hotel, London
Charles hotel, Munich, Germany
Hotel Amigo, Brussels, Belgium
Le Richemond, Geneva, Switzerland
Lowry hotel, Manchester
Villa Kennedy, Frankfurt, Germany

Strategy

In June 2001 a joint venture between Rocco Forte Hotels and Bank of Scotland was agreed to finance further expansion worth £270m. Hotels owned by the joint venture will be managed by the Rocco Forte Collection. The group wants to have 20 to 25 hotels in key European cities.

Chief executive

Sir Rocco Forte

Key directors

Chairman: Sir Rocco Forte
Design director: Olga Polizzi Di Sorrentino
Managing director, sales and marketing: Richard Power
Managing director, hotel operations: Moreno Occhiolini
Group finance director: David Munns

Contact

Savannah House
11 Charles II Street
London
Greater London
SW1 4QU

Tel: 020 7321 2626
Fax: 020 7321 2424

E-mail: enquiries@rfhotels.com
Website: http://www.roccofortehotels.com

Commentary

As chairman and chief executive of Forte, Sir Rocco headed up a sprawling empire that encompassed contract catering, hotels (including Méridien, Travelodge and a majority stake in the Savoy Group), and roadside restaurant brands such as Welcome Break, Little Chef and Happy Eater. Sir Rocco was responsible for more than 800 hotels, 1,000 restaurants and nearly 100,000 employees in 50 countries.

He bounced back quickly after losing the family silver in 1996 and, with Rocco Forte Hotels, is now operating on a smaller, more exclusive scale in which service is king. Each hotel is individually designed by his sister, Olga Polizzi, who is a designer of international repute and herself the owner of the Hotel Tresanton in Cornwall and Endsleigh House hotel in Devon.

The group aims to provide restaurants that are destinations in their own right, of which the jewel in the crown is the Michelin-star restaurant at the Balmoral. The River Room restaurant at St David's hotel and spa in Cardiff (which was sold in 2007) was created by Marco Pierre White, with whom Sir Rocco joined forces to open the Luciano restaurant in London in 2005 independently of the Rocco Forte Collection.

In the pipeline

Spring 2008: A joint-venture hotel in Prague, Czech Republic, in conjunction with the Bank of Scotland
2009: The Verdura Golf and Spa Resort in Sicily, as a joint venture with an Italian government body
December 2009: A £170m golf resort in Marrakech, Morocco, which the Rocco Forte Collection will run under a management contract.

The group is also in advanced talks for a city centre project in Moscow. It is also seeking properties in Paris, Milan, Madrid, Barcelona, Amsterdam and New York