Management Rules of a Hotel Front Desk

Every successful organization consist of a management team. When we view this statement with keeping hotels in the center, we can say that every successful department of hotels consist of a management team. There are many departments in a hotel such as housekeeping, room service and other less visible like property maintenance etc. But out of all these, a hotel front desk is the most important one as it acts as a face of a hotel. Whenever a guest enters a hotel, their first important conversation is with the hotel front desk. Hence it is very important that a hotel must have some golden rules to make their front desk a brilliant and effective one.

One can see that if a hotel guest has any complaint about the housekeeping, room service or any other department; he will instantly call to the front desk of the hotel. Hence it proves that this department is the most valuable one and are awesome multitasking. Below I have mentioned a few management tasks which a front desk must handle.

1. Strong relationship, not only with guest, but with other departments of the hotel.

Maintaining good relations with the guest is an important task for the team but it’s not enough for an awesome hotel management. The team should act like a savior to all the other departments. For example if a guest isn’t happy with the housekeeping and the house keeping departments isn’t able to calm the residing guest, than the front desk should intervene. The best solution here is to immediately offer a new room to the guest and this decision only resides with the team, not with the housekeeping staff. So the team needs to support a healthy and natural relation with all the other department teams of the hotel.

2. Proper line of authority in front desk team.

Another universal management rule is that every department must have a clear line of authority. In other words every employee must know that whom he or she must contact for when of any issue or problem. The same rule is properly implemented in the hotel front desk. An effective team must have a head who will directly reporting to the top management of the hotel. As the team will definitely receive issues from other teams and chances are high that a senior manager from another department will definitely try to show his or her authority to the front desk team. Hence the team needs to follow a proper line of authority and should follow orders given by their team head.

3. Total support from the top management.

Well no team can have an upper hand on other teams if they don’t have the total support from the top management. After discussing the above two points it’s clear that the team handles tasks like customer relationship, customer supports in difficult times and many more tough tasks. Hence the person who is the leader of this team must have the complete support from the top management. The top management is more flexible with him as compare to other department heads.

The goal of a hotel is to earn revenue with proper usage of available resource. As in hotel business customer satisfaction is in the center, hence the management will remove all the lazy efforts as these actions will hurt their organization image. So a front desk manager is an ideal person to take all the tough decision like firing employees who aren’t performing well, checking the usefulness of other departments and showcases the overall efforts of all the other teams to the top heads.

Out of all the above three points, the third one is the most important. As the team always has a higher hand than the other departments, hence the top management should clearly explain all the departments that they must contact the team at difficult times and should properly report their performance reports to them. In reporting, the head of other departments should support the performance report of their teams and should later share it with the front desk team leader, as the employees of other departments should also have a solid line of authority in their team.

To simplify the task of the team, top management will equip their team with modern hotel software’s like hotel management system, attendance systems etc. Creating the overall performance report isn’t an easy task hence proper cloud tools will being used. Well finally I would like to say that every team effort is useless if there is lack of good understanding between the hotel departments. Every team head gets judged by his management and by his attitude to show others that he is as equal even though others are reporting to him. By having such attitude the front desk head will only earn the trust of others and deliver high revenue.