Bruno Corte, hotelier par excellence who played a key role in founding South Africa’s hospitality industry, was murdered at the age of 59 while shopping at a Woolworth’s store in Johannesburg.
Bruno built and ran world-class hotels in South Africa as Managing Director of Southern Sun and Legacy hotel groups. He was one of Sol Kerzner’s senior partners at Southern Sun and when Kerzner left to build Sun International in the early 1980’s, Corte became managing director of the group. Filling the legendary Kerzner’s boots would have been a difficult job at the best of times, but for Southern Sun this was the worst of times and the challenge facing the young Corte was a daunting one.
Kerzner took the group’s high-income casino hotels – the jewels in its crown – with him and Corte inherited the unprofitable rump. This included 65 hotels that were suddenly stranded without its life-support system, namely the Sun City and Wild Coast.
Included in Corte’s inheritance was the new Cape Sun, which was still finding its feet and had not yet turned a profit, and one of Kerzner’s biggest follies, the disastrous Johannesburg Sun and Towers.
Kerzner had built the 850-room Johannesburg Sun at a cost of R120-million with the intention of bringing large groups from overseas and pushing them through Johannesburg to do a spot of gambling at Sun City. This didn’t happen and the hotel was a white elephant from the start. Corte was left to handle an enormous debt on the property that, far from turning a profit, remained a major financial burden on the group’s resources throughout his reign.
Corte’s job was made even more difficult by the fact that Kerzner took a number of the groups most experienced and talented management people with him. As well as depriving him of much needed skills, this also left Corte with a situation of declining morale.
The fact that Corte managed to pull what was left of the group together and make it as profitable as he did without the casinos, was a remarkable achievement. In large, partly because of a personality that tended to avoid publicity, this accomplishment did not garner the recognition it might have.
In terms of leadership style, Corte could not have been more different from the flamboyant, swashbuckling, autocratic Kerzner. While the “Sun King” made headlines wherever he went, the press largely ignored Corte.
He was a private, unobtrusive, behind-the-scenes man; a professional hotelier to the fingertips, who preferred to let his hotels speak for him.
Far from a control freak, he didn’t believe it necessary to hold dozens of board meetings. He gave his staff responsibility, made them accountable and left them space to make decisions and to use their initiative. “I don’t require daily progress reports from my staff,” he explained. “Once they have a clear idea of what they’re doing, I expect them to get on with it.”
When Kerzner walked into a hotel his staff were terrified. When Corte, who unlike Kerzner was a physically large and imposing man, walked in his staff rushed to greet him with smiles and obvious affection.
Not that Corte was a soft touch. He was decisive and spoke very bluntly when someone messed up. His Italian blood made the occasional eruption inevitable, but he was not temperamental and there was usually a good reason for it.
When these rare outbursts subsided, he was as accommodating and approachable as ever. Staff could come to him with their problems and, be it a waiter, barman, junior manager or general manager, he listened.
Corte was born in Johannesburg on October 25 1943. He went to St. John’s Prep School in Houghton and Pretoria Boys High. After doing his national service in the navy, he spent three years at the Lausanne Hotel School, in Switzerland.
His first really senior posting in South Africa was as general manager of the President Hotel in Cape Town. He was then general manager of the five-star Elangeni in Durban, which in the mid-to-late-1970s, was the flagship of the Southern Sun group. Raffles nightclub on top of the Elangeni was the place for South Africa’s glitz and glamour brigade to be seen.
Under his management, the Elangeni was as profitable as all of the group’s other, non-casino, hotels put together. From there Corte became the group’s regional director for the then Natal and was responsible for many of the most famous hotels in the country including the Malibu, Maharani, Elangeni, Beverley Hills and Cabana Beach.
As operations director for Southern Sun, he expanded its portfolio of hotels, building, among others, the Drakensburg Sun and Malelane Lodge in the Lowveld.
He was particularly passionate about the food and beverage side of the industry. This was the glamorous side and a distinguishing feature of Southern Sun hotels in those days. He formed a close partnership over many years with the group’s executive chef, Billy Gallagher, whom he’d talked into not going off with Kerzner. Gallagher is also a victim of South Africa’s crime wave, having been paralysed by a bullet some years ago.
Corte’s strength at Southern Sun was operational rather than visionary: he had an extraordinary ability to keep tabs on the performance of individual hotels in the group on a daily basis.
In 1990 the controlling shareholders, SA Breweries, decided the time had come to lay more emphasis on the strategic and forward-planning side of the business, and Ron Stringfellow was brought in alongside Corte to provide this.
The relationship between old-style professional hotelier with his passion for the nitty-gritty of running hotels, and the younger chartered accountant whose interests were more in strategic planning, was not easy. Corte, who’d just finished building three Southern Sun’s hotels in the Seychelles, realized that SAB wanted new leadership and that his time in the group was up.
After a breather of 18 months or so, he became the managing director of Stocks and Stocks hotels and resorts arm, which subsequently became Legacy Hotels (now comprising around 16 hotels and game lodges from Dar es Salaam to Cape Town) under the joint ownership of Corte and former Stocks and Stocks boss Bart Dorrestein.
One of his finest moments was getting its five-star hotel in Windhoek finished in time for the 1996 Miss Universe pageant. It was still being built as the contestants arrived. Two weeks before 600 million TV watchers around the world were due to tune in, the roof of the conference centre burnt down.
His finest hour, however, was the completion in 1996 of the Michelangelo Hotel on Sandton Square. Corte considered this his dream hotel.
Bruno Corte is survived by his wife of 33 years, Gail, and their four children.
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