Charles Forte on Carving His Own Path in the Family Hotel Business

There’s a tradition in the Forte family of starting on the lowest rungs of the hospitality ladder and working their way up.

In 1911, Rocco Forte emigrated from Italy to Scotland to open a cafe that would mark the first hospitality establishment in the namesake family business. He would go on to open several more restaurants in the U.K., which his son would continue to grow.

Although the hotel group has ebbed and flowed through the decades, it finds itself in a new era with all three adult members of the current generation working for the company.

Charles Forte, 32, is one of those three and followed in the steps of his grandfather by starting in hospitality service. At age 15, he was a waiter at London’s Brown’s Hotel—owned by Rocco Forte Hotels since 2003—and has worked in almost every area of the hotel and restaurant industry since.

Today, he is the group’s director of development, responsible for steering external partnerships and capital investments.

“My role is to find new opportunities and develop ourselves on a much smaller scale,” he says.

In January, Saudi Arabia’s PIF sovereign wealth fund took a 49% investment stake in Rocco Forte Hotels—a deal Charles helped complete. He says that the investment will help guide the group’s next growth phase, which includes a target of three hotels per year and expansion in the Middle East, among other regions. Through 2027, the group is opening four new properties in Italy and working on a project in Marrakesh, Morocco.

The family’s roots are Italian and that’s where many of the group’s most notable properties reside, although according to Charles, more than 40% of the company’s business is within the U.S.

Alongside his two sisters Lydia and Irene, Charles is connecting the Forte name to a new generation of luxury travellers through partnership deals with brands like the Macallan and smaller, longer-term property builds in Italy and elsewhere.

Penta caught up with Forte by phone from his office in London.

PENTA: Do you think working in a family business brings more challenges or opportunities?

Charles Forte: Being in a family business like this affords opportunities you wouldn’t have otherwise. My sisters and I worked in all the different departments of the hotels, and I realistically always wanted to join the business. At other times, I did want to be a filmmaker, but I wanted to be a part of the family legacy. My dad is a good mentor and I’ve never really looked back.

How do you differentiate yourself in an extremely competitive luxury hotel market?

It’s very challenging to differentiate ourselves. Sometimes I struggle to differentiate between us and other luxury brands because a lot of the products are very similar. There’s an international luxury aesthetic that’s very copy and paste, and a lot of the bigger guys are trying to create new brands within their own stable of brands. Our hotels are very design-oriented and not so traditional, for example.

What differentiates us is the family aspect. There’s a real family behind this, and it creates value in our brand. We have this “quiet luxury” aesthetic.

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What is your philosophy on hotel partnerships? Do you find yourself chasing partnerships with big-name brands to stay on par with your competitors?

Partnerships have value if they have relevance and the partner is relevant to the destination. We don’t chase partnerships because if we did, it would mean that something is missing from the hotel. These partnerships should be organic. I’m excited because we recently brought in a new director of marketing who worked at Six Senses, and that will help us do more meaningful and special collaborations and partnerships.

Do you think that’s creating more appeal for Rocco Forte Hotels among the younger generation of luxury travellers?

There’s a broad range of pace in this space, considering how competitive the operator landscape has become. We’re finding that younger travellers aren’t geared towards any specific trend. I think we’re slightly more classic in appeal. We’re not ostentatious. There’s no substitute for beautiful design and great service—we’re not looking to reinvent the world. Depending on which hotel they visit, some people know us as a brand, others as a specific independent hotel, and we’d like consumers to know which brand is behind the property.

In August, we opened Rocco Forte House Milan, which features more longer-stay keys, where stays can be two weeks, a month or a year. We’re finding that’s something more travellers want and we can build a nice client base for those who want longer stays.

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

Chip makers are fighting to assure investors that the artificial-intelligence boom is racing forward. Wall Street might not believe it until Nvidia’s NVDA -0.98%decrease; down pointing triangle Jensen Huang says so.

When Huang steps up to the mic for his company’s earnings call Wednesday, he will have the world’s attention. What he says about Nvidia’s present will preview the future of AI, dictate the path forward for a tech-crazed stock market and influence an American economy increasingly tethered to hopes that the boom won’t go bust.

The $5 trillion chip maker has provided the key building blocks for AI since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022 set off a race for dominance among OpenAI, Anthropic and established Silicon Valley giants. Now, as Nvidia backstops sprawling data-center projects and an exotic money pipeline to boost chip demand, the company’s influence is arguably bigger than ever.

But there are signs of trouble ahead. Political pushback to AI is growing. A bond selloff propelled borrowing costs to their highest levels in years. The hyperscalers that include some of Nvidia’s key customers—once cash-printing machines—are relying more on debt. OpenAI recently told investors its revenue rose by a tepid 18% in the second quarter while its losses deepened.

Nvidia is increasingly stepping in to shore up potential weak points across the market. Earlier this month, the company teamed up with six of Wall Street’s biggest firms on a $500 billion AI-financing plan, pledging to backstop lending to customers that can’t afford its chips otherwise. The chip maker last week also took a stake in Cloverleaf Infrastructure, which arranges power for data centers, and struck a $6 billion deal with startup Poolside aimed at developing a powerful open-weight AI model.

After watching shares in other chip makers and the so-called Magnificent Seven tech companies swing wildly in recent months, Wall Street is hoping Nvidia can beat expectations—again. The countdown is on.

“It’s kind of becoming more and more like the World Cup final than the Super Bowl at this point,” said Brian Mulberry, chief market strategist at Zacks Investment Management. “It’s just gotten to be that big.”

The company has smashed analysts’ earnings estimates for each of the 14 quarters since the AI boom kicked into high gear. Nvidia posted 210% annual growth in net income in its last three-month period, according to FactSet, making Wall Street’s 126% projection look pedestrian.

Expectations for a blowout second quarter have risen rapidly over the course of this year. All Nvidia will have to do to beat this target: outrun 95% annual earnings growth to more than $51.5 billion. Analysts project the chip maker will report record sales of $92 billion for the period, up from a forecast of $78 billion at the start of this year.

In July, big-tech earnings sparked volatility. Concerns about runaway capital spending spread across the sector after Alphabet’s and Tesla’s results, driving a $890 billion wipeout that contributed to the unwind of hedge fund Situational Awareness. Microsoft posted the largest one-day gain in market capitalization by any company, ever, after a quarter proving that it could still show investors the money. SpaceX rocketed higher after a record-breaking initial public offering, only to see $1 trillion in value evaporate.

Surging memory prices and borrowing costs have fueled fears that those and other companies will be unable to keep plowing more money into supplies including Nvidia chips. Shaia Hosseinzadeh, founder of OnyxPoint Global Management, has recently bought dips in AI-infrastructure stocks when Wall Street has strained to absorb massive debt issued by Silicon Valley.

“The macro data is really quite robust,” he said. “Of course, there’s a level at which everything breaks.”

Investors have kept pumping money into the AI trade despite concerns around chip consumers—and to the benefit of chip producers. That is why Nvidia’s outlook for semiconductor demand could send ripples through counterparts such as Micron Technology and Sandisk, developers of the data centers in which their chips reside, and a supply chain of power producers, contractors and other specialists that underpin the globe-spanning AI build-out.

“We joke internally that we’re all Nvidia analysts now,” said David Lefkowitz, head of U.S. equities at UBS Global Wealth Management.

The irony is that investors have tended to sell Nvidia stock immediately after blockbuster earnings, with shares falling each trading session after its four past quarterly reports. Some are betting that will be the case this time around, too.

The options market is pricing in a 5.3% swing, higher or lower, in Nvidia shares during the session following earnings, according to Option Research & Technology Services. That is higher than the 4.8% average move in Nvidia’s stock over the last 12 months after the company reports quarterly results.

In recent days, some of the most actively traded Nvidia options have been put contracts tied to the stock falling from its Friday value of $214.75 to $205 and $210 apiece, according to Cboe Global Markets data. Put options give the right to sell a stock by a set price and typically represent a bearish wager.

Many analysts remain optimistic. Frank Lee, global head of tech hardware and semiconductor research at HSBC Global Investment Research, recently raised his price target for Nvidia shares to $360 from $325, citing, among other things, Nvidia’s strategic partnerships with suppliers and its role as a top contributor to open-source AI.

Charles Forte on Carving His Own Path in the Family Hotel Business

Nvidia’s earnings will test Wall Street’s confidence in the AI boom.