How to Improve Front Office Operations in Hotels.

Every task in the hotels has a predefined SOP. However, with time, it needs to be upgraded. Talking about current practices in hotel front office operations, they need to be updated in the terms of technology as well as processes.

1. Align Tasks Based On Their Priority

One thing that I learnt during training is prioritising my tasks. I had clear instructions to prepare a list of ‘to do things’, sort them as per priority, and follow them accordingly daily. Trust me, it helped me in avoiding missing any task. For instance, my main responsibilities were:

• Checking the arrival and departures
• Aligning pickup and drop (if requested)
• Cross checking guests folios for bill posts
• Forwarding guests’ requests to concerned departments
• Assisting bell desk with luggage handling

Now, as per the priority, the first thing I would do is checking on guest requisitions and taking a follow-up about the same. Because if those were left unattended, it can result in a guest dissatisfaction. Gradually, I would finish the other tasks and had a lot of spare time left, which was utilised to learn a thing or two. This is what you should ask your every front desk staff to follow

2. Invest in Training Front Desk Staff

Once you start following the first step, you will find that there’s ample time to train your staff. I’ve seen many hotels providing the training during initial days of joining, and it hardly lasts for a couple of days. Post that, the staff has to learn as they work. But that’s where they go wrong. Training should be an ongoing process. Let me share an example of one of the finest hotels in India. Lemon Tree is one of the fastest growing hotel chains in India. They have a unique training model for their staff. Whenever a person joins the organisation across any property in the country, s/he is sent to the head office for training and making him/her familiar with the process. Once the training is completed, s/he is deployed at the designated property. However, it doesn’t end here. They have a quarterly performance evaluation. Based on the performance and scores, candidates are given rewards. If they are not up to the mark, a refresher course is scheduled for them. This kind of training makes staff more efficient, aids in providing a better guest satisfaction, and is one of the proven ways to improve your hotel’s front desk operations. You should take a cue from them and start providing training to each and every staff member who is a part of your hotel’s front office department.

3. Keep Sufficient Staff

One problem that hotels commonly face is labor/staff shortage. And this does impact guest experience in a negative way. I’ve faced such a situation once, and it was really a horrendous experience. A couple of years ago, I used to work in one of the well-known hotels in the city. Being a graduate in hospitality management, I had certain notions about how the work would be. But I received waves of surprises on the first day itself. The property had inadequate staff starting from the hotel’s front desk itself. There were just 2 people at the reception (including me), and we had to manage the tasks of bellboys as well.  In fact, the front office manager was handling the role of concierge, reservations manager, and AGM. This created a lot of problems when there were multiple check-ins and check-outs.  Trust me, I worked for hardly 2 days and realised it was not my cup of tea. That’s when I understood the importance of manpower in the hotels. If you are also doing this at your property (assigning various roles to every staff member), STOP IT RIGHT NOW. Ensure that you have sufficient staff in your hotel’s front office department and assign them specific roles and responsibilities as per their designation and qualifications.

4. Know Your Guests

I’m flattered when hotels have all the arrangements made at the property, even before me asking for it. What I mean is that your regular guests would be asking for particular amenities or services every time they’d book their stay with you. So, instead of guests asking you, why not surprise them by pre-arranging their common requisitions. For this, you need to focus on collecting, analysing, and studying your guests’ data. Apart from this, consider feedback from guests and try to inculcate them during their next visit. You can try to do this manually, but that would be quite an arduous task. Instead, leverage technology and AI to accomplish it.

5. Bring Technology in the Picture

Technology has changed the hospitality industry drastically. From entering guests’ data manually into various registers to getting all the data recorded on cloud-based servers, we have come a long way. Technology  has indeed helped hotels in minimising human efforts and increasing the efficiency of each and every task. And the front office operations in hotels have benefited the most from technology. How? Well, if you think about it, there are various activities in a hotel front office operations which would become quite time consuming if done manually. For example, night audit not implement software for these tasks. You might be wondering, who doesn’t? However, the truth is that there are still hotels that believe in a pen and paper system. Also, there are many others who just invest in PMS and channel manager just for the sake of it  But that should not be the case. In order to optimise hotel front office operations it is quite important that you should invest in technological aspects like PMS (integrated with channel manager), reputation management software, and revenue management system. Although there are a lot of other software available in the market, these three are sufficient for your hotel’s front office operations. process, guest profiling and data management, daily revenue calculation, and forecasting; the list is unending. Now imagine doing this on a daily basis without the help of any software or system. Sounds hectic, isn’t it? So, why

6. Introduce Your Property

While you are investing in technological aspects, there’s one thing I’d like to drive your attention to ‒‒ Artificial Intelligence . One of the best examples of it is chatbots. You can deploy chatbots on your hotel’s website or kiosks. With the help of machine learning and sentiment analysis, it understands guests’ behavior. Further, it guides them at various stages of their stay at your property. In fact, advanced chatbots like Rose are found effective in increasing hotels revenue exponentially by upselling and guiding guests into spending more at the property. Such tools act as a helping hand to the front office department.

7. Go Contactless

Post covid-19, the world adopted the concept of contactless living, and so did the hospitality industry. Be it greeting guests with folded hands (Namaste!!!), using QR code-based payment modes, various things have changed. Talking about the front office operations in hotels, they had to find various techniques to avoid any physical contact with guests. That’s where contactless service come into the picture. Just imagine, guests booking rooms, checking-in at the hotel, availing services, and checking out of the property seamlessly with less or negligible human interaction. Sounds interesting, isn’t it? These contactless services could be self-check-in kiosks, ordering food from the hotel’s app, using chatbots to guide apps throughout their stay, QR code or payment links for billing, and such likes. Try to find more such solutions and instigate them at your hotel’s front desk for better benefits.

8. Optimise SOPs to Increase Efficiency

As I said in the beginning, every process works for a certain period and, with time, needs to be updated. It applies to SOPs also. For instance, before covid-19 guests were welcomed with a handshake. But now they are greeted with “Namaste”. Or let’s take the feedback collection process. Initially, guests were presented with paper forms for rating a hotel’s services, and now we have reviewing websites like Trip Advisor. With every update you adopt for your hotel, it is vital to make changes in SOPs also.

9. Maintain Important Reports

Last but not least, one of the important tasks in hotel front office operations is maintaining reports. At the end of the day, every department submits its sales report at the front desk for processing. This is a crucial activity as once all the data is collaborated, it helps in generating various revenue based figures like ADR, ARR, RevPAR, total sales, total revenue generated, and so on. In fact, the majority of these reports are generated during night audits, which is part of hotel’s front desk operations. Hence, missing on any of this report can cause a lot of miscalculation.