Hilton's Forte

Walk into any Hilton hotel in Europe some time in the future, and you are likely to be using electronic equipment whose development was influenced by a Maltese.

Andrew Forte, chief engineer at Hilton Malta up to the summer of 2004 is now director of utilities management of Hilton International, coordinating the purchase and use of utilities in 90 hotels from Copenhagen to Mauritius.

His role includes technical planning in the hotel room of the future with the world's top providers, which is why he will discuss new lighting technology with Philips next week before touring the Siemens research and development centre in Zurich a couple of weeks later, when the talk will be on wireless hotel rooms and automation.

Ing. Forte graduated from Malta and followed a UK postgraduate course on building services, focused on energy management, before working as senior consulting engineer with MTS Ltd for eight years. That led to his direct involvement in the design of the Portomaso project before joining the Hilton Malta as the hotel's chief engineer.

Hilton International's vice president for technical services Europe and Africa quickly offered him a position within technical services at the corporate office in London and he became part of the franchise development team.

That was a crucial time as Hilton International was starting to franchise a mid-market brand across Europe. The team developed a technical and financial hotel model to enable the franchise owners to build a hotel in the shortest and cheapest possible way up to the brand's standards.

In February 2006 that role took on a completely new dimension when Hilton International was bought by Hilton Hotels Corporation, which was very strong in franchising and had a portfolio of nine brands.

Ing. Forte was responsible for the technical side of the conversion of three franchise hotels under construction for Scandic in Stuttgart, Rome and Florence to the higher standards of Hilton Garden Inn focused service hotels. Those three properties became the first of Hilton's American brands to cross over to Europe but the process has now built up momentum and new properties will be built and existing ones re-branded in the coming months to meet the ambitious development targets set by the company's CEO. Mr Forte inspected as many as 40 franchised properties in one year to discuss rebranding.

In June last year Mr Forte was promoted to a new role as director of utilities management and became Hilton International's point man for all utility contracts by Hilton hotels in Europe and Africa with their energy services providers.

That includes negotiating contracts with energy supply and distribution companies as well as sourcing equipment contracts in as centralised a manner as possible.

For a start the aim is to group hotels in each country so that contracts would end at the same time, strengthening the group's hand in negotiations with suppliers, he said.

"Although Europe says that the energy market is liberalised it is not yet that liberalised. For example, in France, although technically one can buy electricity from any source, you then run into all sort of stumbling blocks for the distribution of that electricity," he said.

"Our eventual target is to have a single pan European deal for the purchase, primarily, of electricity and gas for all our hotels from one provider for each utility."

Ing. Forte has also been tasked with reducing the carbon footprint of the Hilton hotels, not only by reducing energy consumption but also by looking carefully at the source of CO2 emissions.

Last year alone CO2 emissions were reduced by 5.1 per cent to 14.2kg per guest night, a cumulative total of 5,800 tonnes of CO2 emissions.

He is now also very heavily involved in the technical design of Hilton International managed hotels and is currently following new buildings in Frankfurt, The Hague, Visegrad near Budapest, Kampala in Uganda and Kiev in the Ukraine.

"I sit down with the owners and their consultants and make sure that the designs meet Hilton standards including environmental sustainability and energy efficiency. I also guide them on what is on the market and convince them to go for newer and more efficient technologies."

The same process is applied to existing hotels, where the discussion is over what capital investment can be made to reduce energy costs and harmful emissions. The Hilton energy bill in Europe and Africa reached $46.9m last year.

He is also the man responsible for the We Care! programme, the initiative involving Hilton hotels through Europe and Africa where hotel team members were invited to come up with, and implement projects to improve the environment.

In that context he also has regular meetings with top manufacturers on market developments and the direction of their research and development.

"They have loads of ideas, and so do we, on what a hotel room should look like a few years from now, particularly the wireless room where all controls, whether for lighting, air conditioning and television, are integrated into one control which will also include a sound and music system across the whole room or suite. There are also many ideas on automation and sensors, such as a sensor which will sense the heat of the person in the room, regulate temperature accordingly, and switch off when the room is vacant," he said.

"It is a three pronged approach - guest comfort, environmental sustainability and return on investment. All three do go together. We can pamper the guests while pampering the environment like a five-star hotel should, by choosing energy efficient equipment, proper fuels and gas, sorting and recycling our waste...."

Ing. Forte is the only Maltese to hold a senior position within Hilton International and, he says, he has been asked a million times whether he has any link with Rocco Forte. He doesn't.