Hotel Front Office Operations

Examples of University Progression

Awarding Body

Qualification

Course Details

Front Office is an important department in the hotel and often referred to as the ‘heart’ or the ‘centre’ of a hotel. The Front Office department includes many job roles such as reservationists, receptionists, telephonists, concierge and night auditors. They all have responsibilities in ensuring that they meet and exceed the customers’ and hotel’s needs. Not all customers are the same and often they have different requirements. Front Office team members would need to have the skills and the knowledge in dealing with large groups, families, VIP customers, overseas guests and customers with a disability and understand what their needs are during their stay. In this unit we will be exploring the different roles and responsibilities and how the Front Office team members meet all the different customers’ needs by offering a variety of services.Customers interact with the front office department throughout their stay. This is referred to as the guest cycle. The customer will first interact with the reservations department when trying to make a booking. When a reservation has been made, the next department they will be in contact with is the concierge and the reception team who will check the customer into their room and assist the customer with their luggage. Once checked in, the customer may ask questions about the hotel, local area, ordering flowers, making outside calls etc, which the receptionist, concierge and nights team are able to deal with. During the night, the night auditor ensures the customer invoice is up to date and correct with all charges posted. Then on the day of departure, the reception and concierge will be on hand to deal with the check-out process. In this unit, we will be looking at the guest cycle in detail and find out the procedures in relation to taking reservations, checking-in customers, running the night audit and checking-out the customers.Front Office team members need to ensure that they have good knowledge in dealing with the many different payment methods. They must understand the importance of meeting credit control standards to avoid loss of revenue. The standards, customer service level and financial performance is measured on a regular basis in Front Office. This is done through mystery guests, reservation test calls and monitoring important front office key performance indicators on the P&L account. Front Office team members also need to be aware of the many different laws which affect their department such as data protection, immigration, contracts and price tariff and display. In this unit, we will be looking at the different types of payment methods and invoices and how credit control is applied throughout the guest cycle. Performance measurement within Front Office will be discussed as well as a variety of laws which have a big impact on the daily running of Front Office.

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