Challenging aspects of the receptionist role: Front office is the management part of a hotel that deals with the clients. The term role by definition is a function that one has in an organization. Handling of guests; the receptionist deals with reservations, checking in and out of the guests. The guests expect the receptionist to be able to deal with all complaints and also act as their informer about the surroundings even though it not in her area of jurisdiction.
Service delivery and guest expectations; The receptionist is charged with the responsibility of instilling a sense of well being in clients who are unable to appreciate what they have been offered: this can be seen in the case of the lady who was offered a room but was not contented with it and wanted to move to another one with a mountain view despite the fact that she had no prior reservations.
Dealing with basic enquiries; the questions can be time-consuming and out of area of duty. The receptionist should be able to handle questions about the hotel but not about geographical features, the history and the happenings of certain events. These should be well provided for by the tour guides or the websites. The hotel can also provide booklets to help the clients with these information.
The hotel should ease out on this by clearly indicating directions to various areas of the hotel and provide telephone numbers for other areas of the hotel like the kitchen, coffee house, bar; in case the guests want to order food, drinks or beverages without necessarily having to go through the reception. Advertiser: the receptionist acts as the sole informer of all the hotel services available. Prioritizing competing demands should not arise as the services should sell equally. Also, informing the customers of other competing brands should not arise.
Challenges of a hotel receptionist job: Guests’ satisfaction; the hotel industry is very delicate because its survival largely relies on good handling of the customers. Therefore, the receptionist must ensure all the guests’ queries are properly handled. Customers handled well are likely to come back or tell their friends and families aspiring to visit that area about their encounter and this helps in advertisement. (Mouth to mouth advertisement) Acting as the link between the guests and the other departments in the hotel; the front office is supposed to act as the center of all other departments.
The way a receptionist handles the guests creates or demolishes their expectations and eagerness towards other services to be rendered. Record transactions; juggling between tasks can prove to be very challenging especially where you have to handle guests and at the same time be able to keep up with the records especially in billing as customers require updated balances and still the hotel want everything billed so as not to lose money. Expression of feelings and anger; the receptionist is in no circumstance to show her/his displeasure or anger.
Some guests can be intimidating, disrespectful and also demanding, yet the receptionist is always supposed to keep her/his cool and a smile despite the difficult situation as the ‘guest is always right can be seen in the case of the receptionist and Miss Lims (Wijesinghe 2009 pp. 6-8).
Sociability; A receptionist should enjoy serving the guests at all times. Through tough times, he or she should be able to interact with them freely.
Character traits desired to meet the above challenges. Maturity: this is the quality of thinking and behaving in a sensible adult manner. It is borne out of individualistic perceptions and cognitive experiences. This is the state of being able to make responsible and sensible decisions. A receptionist should be able to make various decisions when confronted by all problems and where she can not solve, she should be ready to enquire from people in authority.
Flexibility: able to change to meet different conditions or situations. A receptionist should always be responsive to change and accommodate different behaviours of the guests. Therefore, she or he should be adaptive. The hotel keeps changing from time to time and therefore calls for the front office staff to be dynamic. Resourceful: being good at finding ways of doing things and solving problems. Every person has his or her way of doing things. A front office representative must always have ways of solving problems to enhance customer satisfaction.
Enthusiastic: feeling and showing a lot of excitement about something. For one to be a successful receptionist she or he should enjoy the work they do and avoid being stressed as this can lower their job output. Reliability: As the first contact of the guests, a receptionist should be trustable mostly in handling the customer balances and credit cards. The management also entrusts the front office personnel to be in charge of keeping the guest’s treasures.
Job is a form of ‘no sweat labour’. The front office operations can be perceived as a ‘no sweat labour because it mostly involves mental work rather than physical. They cannot be seen to work too hard but at the end of the day, their work is more than the workers at the bottom of the hierarchy who are involved in manual work.
The work of the receptionist can be engaging because it involves both guest relations and clerical work. These include answering switchboard telephones, dealing with basic enquiries, meeting and greeting of guests, handling reservations, taking guests messages, checking in and out of the guest, and handling requests. The clerical work may include: putting together bills and handling of payments (Зeter & Sue 2002).
The work mostly goes unappreciated by the guests, the coworkers and the management so no one identifies with their plight. The receptionist can be seen to be ‘jerks’ as they handle all the areas of a hotel from handling bookings to ordering of food for the guests. They work in close relation with the management but are not management. They are seen as outsiders by the rest of the workers because of lack of interactive time as the rest of the workers can freely interact at lunch or tea time in their cafeteria (Ahmed Ismail 2001).
Practical measures that as a manager you could take to make the receptionist work easier. Employment of more front office staff. It’s very clear from the text that the receptionist is overworked and this could lead to low productivity due to long working hours and no time to rest even for lunch. Provision of brochures to the guests to provide information and also large maps indicating the different locations of various sites. Provision of computers that have internet for the guests to Google all their questions may also be of importance.
Employment of cashiers who are able to process the bills for the guests mostly the checkout guests and also create accounts for the checking in guests. The system should be interfaced for quicker processing of bills. Provision of telephone numbers in each and every room for the guests to avoid contacting the receptionist in case of another service to be offered like room service and ordering of food. Better understanding of the receptionist and subsequent appreciation for the work done. This can be done by once in a while offering gifts and pay rises. It will create a sense of appreciation as she is the main communication link between the hotel and the guests. They create a long-lasting impression about the hotel, ‘treat one guest well and comes back with nine treat another badly and loss nine customers.’
Hospitality reception work has the pedagogic role of educating guest on what to consume and what to expect when they are on the holiday.
The guests come with the expectations of a good place to enjoy their time. They have to enquire before arrival and after. The receptionist act as a teacher by educating the guests about the hotel culture. They also act as the guide to help the tourists around the place by telling them the best place and cheapest restaurant to dine, the nearest ATM machine and the different sites to observe (Wijesinghe 2009). The receptionist is also charged with the responsibility of telling the guests how to best enjoy their holiday.
It is seen in the case of Mrs. Dimitrivich who was calling to enquire about the best room for her honeymoon and the pleasantries offered. The role can also be well seen when the receptionist act as the historian telling the guests how old the buildings are and as a geographer telling them of what to expect in terms of weather conditions, the natural features. The guests come to see the natural features and their formation. There is also an element of being a culture builder; building the holiday culture and communicating the organizational culture.
‘The receptionist is like the meat between the sandwiches’.
This is due to the pressure impacted on them by the management for performance and by the guests for satisfaction. The guests make demands beyond the receptionist’s immediate role even when she has to attend to other guests. She has a hard time to persuade the guests to appreciate the services offered to them and this builds up pressure to satisfy them. They pressure the receptionist to attend to them by demanding allocation of rooms that are not ready for occupancy.
The management put the receptionist under more pressure by overworking her; fifteen hours a day and not even giving her a break in between sessions for even lunch yet high productivity is demanded. The other members of staff treat her as an outsider by being cold to her. This can also lead to undue pressure.
References
- Ahmed, I 2001, Front office operations and management. Albany, New York.
- Peter, A., & Sue, L., 2002, Problems faced by front office procedures 4th ed, Oxford, Boston
- Slavoj, M& Ingram, H, 2000, The business of hotels, 4th ed, Butterworth-Heinemann, Woburn.
- Sheppard, H, & Marguerite, D, 2000, Opportunities in hotel and motel management careers, VGM Career Horizons, Chicago.
- Wijesinghe, G, 2009, Case booklet: phenomenological case studies on the experience of hospitality reception practice (unpublished), University of South Australia, Adelaide.