Forte-fying Abu Dhabi

Rocco Forte Hotels will open its first hotel in the region this year and the first to bear the name of the company’s founder and CEO, Sir Rocco Forte. With it, the company brings its modern approach to service and style, says Richard Power, the brand managing director

Richard Power is one of those terribly likeable chaps that one could happily talk to for hours. This is especially so when it comes to the history, philosophy and design of Rocco Forte Hotels, upon which Power is an expert.

He has worked alongside Sir Rocco Forte for close to 30 years now, firstly during the times of Forte Plc — which at its zenith comprised more than 800 hotels, 1000 restaurants and 100,000 employees — and now at Rocco Forte Hotels, the luxury brand Power helped found in 1996.

Forte Plc was sold after a hostile takeover bid, which ultimately saw the company being broken up, and Sir Rocco, his sister Olga Polizzi and Power were left jobless, but with the opportunity to create something entirely based on their shared experience.

“In 1996 we were out of a job, so we decided ‘let’s start another one, but let’s focus on the upmarket area and let’s keep it small’. In a company of that size [Forte Plc] you spend all of your time in board meetings and not much time with customers and the team, and we wanted something more hands on,” recalls Power.

And so Rocco Forte Hotels was founded, with the intention of creating a small collection of luxury hotels in key European destinations, not to mention a brand to rival Europe’s biggest luxury operator, Four Seasons.

“We tried to build our brand to make it something different and the main difference in the early stages was Sir Rocco’s sister Olga Polizzi, who was the design director in the old Forte company and is our design director, and lots more in fact, in the present one,” says Power.

“She felt freed from the men in suits as she called them, she could design something different in hotels. So what Olga’s done is tried to do design that’s less formal, perhaps a bit simpler, but is at the same time very sophisticated. She introduced quite a degree of modernity into the brand at the early stages. From her work came the local roots that we have for each of the hotels.”

Fast forward 15 years and Rocco Forte Hotels now operates 13 hotels in Europe and has signed five hotels outside of the continent — all in the Middle East and North Africa.
The first property is just a few months away from opening in the UAE capital and, as with the previous hotels, the design is expected to provide a point of differentiation in a market that is set to welcome close to 2700 new rooms in the last quarter of 2011 in the luxury segment alone.

Spanning 11 levels, the 28,000m² Rocco Forte Abu Dhabi has been developed in conjunction with Tourism Development & Investment Company (TDIC) and the UAE’s Al Farida Investments Company L.L.C.

“They had done quite a lot of design and a bit of the building before we came on board, but as we’re not in the business of just bolting anything onto our brand, one of the reasons it’s a bit delayed really is that we agreed with them that we would go back and sort of ‘Forte-fy it’ make it feel much more like a Rocco Forte hotel, even though it’s a bit bigger than our normal size,” says Power.

“I think the designers have managed to make it something that’s really quite quirky and I think it will be quite talked about,” he says of the building, a wave-shaped tower with a blue and green glass façade.

“Firstly, it’s shaped a bit like a wave so instead of just having a straight corridor and straight walls, the corridors and the walls go down the waves. There is a huge atrium with a restaurant on the bottom, another restaurant around the edges and then a bar suspended from the ceiling. Coming from the Corniche side, the back of it looks a bit like an ocean liner, it comes down in steps and the roof of each step has a guard light — it looks like an ocean liner rolling off to Dubai.”

The guest rooms have been tweaked too, says Power, to bring them into the Rocco Forte “family” and each of the 281 rooms features leather accents and seating, as well as the Arabic expression ‘May it rain on our desert’ etched above each large bathtub, opposite the walk-in shower.

Obsession with service
This slightly quirky approach to the design also filters through to the service, explains Power.

“It’s about an obsession with service; it’s about not being too formal, while still being respectful and making the hotel fun to go to; clearly if you are out on leisure, fun will be your main element, but 49% of our business is corporate so we try to make it a bit more fun for them too,” he explains.

Creating this service ethos was one of the benefits of setting up the new brand, says Power, and he is confident of transferring this to the Abu Dhabi property.

“We tend to be able to get a real Rocco Forte feel of the service delivery in each one of the hotels and to some degree we don’t quite understand how we’ve done it, but we work very hard on induction, we try and have a relatively soft opening where we’ll try and use some of our own people as customers.

“We also have a tremendously experienced GM there who has opened out here twice successfully, so I think it will be a good hotel. The middle management team, which is really what makes a hotel tick — the GM and then those key people that motivate and train the service crews — comprises some very, very good people; we’ve been absolutely inundated with applications.”

The GM Power refers to is Hagop Doghramadjian, who has been with Rocco Forte for 18 months and previously opened Raffles Dubai and Hilton Jeddah.

Doghramadjian echoes Power’s views on the service: “We will mirror and repeat what Rocco Forte is reputed for and famous for — excellence in service with simplistic luxury, where we make our customers feel comfortable, at ease, with no hiccoughs and no complications.

We are discrete but we know, we support and do everything possible to make that customer, whether in the bar or in the spa or in the room, feel secure and in good hands. We stand by our words and provide what we promise. We walk the talk.

“I want to bring to Abu Dhabi that European know-how with a touch of the UK, where our main office is located, and our hotels so well placed in Germany and Italy. We have a lot of European connections and experience that we want to filter into Abu Dhabi.

“I’m not saying we are better or worse, but you have a lot of Arabic or Arabesque hotels around; we want to bring more of the European feel,” says Doghramadjian.

On that note, how does the team think the GCC market will respond to the European approach? Power says that despite a deliberate focus on UK and American travellers — the latter provide Rocco Forte Hotels’ strongest market — he has been “very pleasantly surprised” by the response of GCC locals.

“We were a bit worried we might not fit that, because the image of a Middle Eastern guest is someone who needs gold leaf everywhere and the like. I think if you take a strong brand positioning you know you won’t appeal to everybody, but we’ve been pleasantly surprised by the response, particularly from the younger families in their 30s and 40s — they seem to adapt to our style, it’s more discrete, they can stay without being the centre of attention.”

Plus, the company is very well connected in the region from its previous work with Forte Plc, which owned the Meridien brand and three years ago, it decided to make a big effort at getting more Middle Eastern customers.

For the European hotels, the GCC is now the fourth biggest market after Germany and it has been one of the biggest growers over the past 12 months.

“We finished our financial year at the end of April and our revenues for the Middle East are up 23%, which in the first half of a year we were still coming out of a recession [h1 2010]. A lot of that growth is driven by rate because of our high suite count,” says Power.

Establishing the name
There is certainly a base in the domestic market familiar with the Rocco Forte name, and Power is focused on increasing this by establishing relationships with the conventional travel trade as well as its usual luxury travel partners.

“I went to see some of them last year, Dnata and the like, and we signed up with quite a lot of the airline’s tour operators programmes, but we have a full-time Middle Eastern specialist who is based in Rome and he does the high net worth individuals and the royalty and the government business, but we will put a second person into the market during this year and they will do the tour operators and the travel agents,” says Power.

“I think there’s quite a lot of conference business from here that we don’t get. Rocco Forte Abu Dhabi will have quite big conference facilities and I think that hotel will help put us on the map in the conference sector,” he adds.

This, coupled with the distinctive design and service, is intended to help Rocco Forte Abu Dhabi battle against the city’s aforementioned competition of 2700 luxury rooms, although long-term Power thinks the supply demand relationship will balance out.

“I think last year and even throughout the downturn, travel into Abu Dhabi consistently grew. There will be a difficult period, there’s no way around it, where you will have a steady growth in arrivals but then a steeper growth in rooms. It will be a more difficult time, but Abu Dhabi is establishing itself cleverly on the world stage.

“It’s focused on two or three iconic areas where it can aim to be the best in the world and it’s doing a really good job, particularly sport and the arts, it is becoming a centre for those areas. I think balance will come back; it may take a year or so in the meantime, we’ll see how things go, says Power, noting that while new hotels are opening, some older stock is likely to disappear.

Of course, Abu Dhabi is not the only Middle Eastern market Rocco Forte Hotels is entering; in 2013 it will open a hotel in Jeddah and in 2014, properties in Marrakech, Cairo and Luxor. The renovation of the iconic Shepheard hotel in Cairo and the Luxor hotel, in partnership with the Egyptian government, are mammoth tasks, but the results are expected to be “something really special” says Power.

And it’s unlikely the development of Rocco Forte Hotels will stop there. While there was enough critical mass to look further afield, Power says the group is “by no means finished in Europe”.

“We need to be in Paris, Moscow, Madrid, Barcelona, Milan,” says Power. “We have made the decision that we would like to have a hotel in New York, we did have a look at a few in the downturn but nothing that quite worked, it’s difficult for us because we’ve got to get something we can either afford to make fit the brand or that fits it already. We’d probably like to be in LA as well. Well see how that ones goes.”

There could still be more hotels for the Middle East too, with up to five locations on the wish-list.

“We’re looking at one in Beirut at the moment,” Power reveals. With exciting projects on the cards, we hope there will be future opportunities to discuss the brand with the affable Power. Until then, we’ll be keeping our eyes on the Forte-fication of Abu Dhabi.