Luxury Hoteliers Magazine 2nd Quarter 2016 | Page 17

directly with us online, offering them a variety of benefits. This includes a complimentary seasonal food and beverage offer carefully selected by our local hotel teams, allowing each guest to experience a taste of what the hotel and city has to offer. How important are online reviews and personalized communication with guests? Online reviews and personalised communication play an important role in regards to maintaining relationships with current guests and how we are positioning ourselves to new audiences. Each of our hotels carefully monitor their review sites, feeding back both positive and negative reviews to the wider team to ensure that we can consistently improve our offerings. Sites such as TripAdvisor are always going to play an important role in the research phase for prospective guests so we ensure the channels are carefully managed. In regards to the digital space we are aware that online reviews, especially on sites such as Google, are important for the hotel’s search performance and with the introduction of Google Hotel Finder and TripAdvisor’s Instant Book we are aware that the guest can complete their booking without needing to visit our branded site, making our presence even more important. Has metasearch levelled the distribution playing field? By allowing the hotels to bid through metasearch, I wouldn’t say it has levelled the playing field but it has definitely given us a slice of the pie! In comparison to the majority of hotel companies OTAs still have much larger budgets to work with allowing them a strong presence, however meta is allowing the hotels to have an active opportunity to increase direct bookings and generate brand awareness in a space which we didn’t have access to before. How do you motivate your team? How have you arrived at your leadership style? Despite having a large team, I work with every individual very closely. Rocco Forte Hotels is a familyrun business. As most people will know, Sir Rocco founded it in 1996 with his sister Olga who is Director of Design for the group. Now his daughters Lydia and Irene Forte are working in the business, looking after restaurant concepts and spa concepts respectively. With a family at the helm, it is a really great example of having strong and very familiar relationships with your colleagues. It creates a warmth in our team and I am often told that this comes across to our guests. To create this, we are very hands-on at every level. How else are you responding to the current wellness trends? Sir Rocco’s daughter, Irene, has lead this area for the past year and resulting from her focused efforts, we have just launched Rocco Forte Spas. The program has been created to allow guests looking to both keep up their existing health and wellness habits whilst travelling, as well as looking to learn new ones. The new proposition unites our spa ethos and offering across our ten hotels. Our new beauty product line, Forte Organics, was created using olive oils and natural ingredients from Verdura Resort in Sicily - flagship spa. These are also used for our new Rocco Forte Rituals, which are spa treatments which can be experienced at all of the hotels. We have also launched Rocco Forte Nourish, offering guests healthy InRoom Bar options, replacing the usual Pringles with kale chips, coconut water instead of wine, and many other options. We also partnered with well-known nutritionists and healthy eating chefs — such as Madeleine Shaw, bestselling author of Get the Glow, who will be creating healthy menus in our restaurants offering options free of gluten, dairy and refined sugars. As someone who travels constantly for work, I am delighted that our hotels are leading the way in this important area. ILHA 17