2. Rooms Division
Hotel’s Department and Their Function
Each department in the hotel is playing the crucial role in providing the good customer service. Actually, they take responsibility and function in diverse areas. Let discuss the functions of the following departments in the hotel.
Front desk
The Front Desk is a core department in a hotel or similar lodging establishment. The employees of front desk will first directly interact with the customers. This department will play a role as liaison between guest, management, and other departments Common duties of a hotel Front: – Greeting customers when they arrived – Handling customers’ enquiries and complaints – Check-in/Check-out Process – Taking Payments – Coordinating housekeeping and engineering requests -Printing and Filing Reports (administrative and secretary function) -Setting Wake-up Calls in phone system (PBX function)
It should be noted that the duties and workload of a hotel Front Desk vary from hotel to hotel; larger hotels may have an independent department to operate the specific function. Just like the PBX function, administrative and secretary function, etc.
Reservation
The department of hotel reservation takes the responsibilities in receives and process reservation requests of the customer. Reservation can be made by the guest simply via the internet, phone, e-mail, post mail, in person or intermediary (e.g. travel agent). The staffs will confirm the reservation with the guest base on their requirements. Once they make the deposit or provide the credit card details to the hotel, the staff will keep the room available for the guest at all times.
Cashier
Front office cashier The monetary transactions of guests are handled by cashier. Employees of the hotel Front Desk are often hourly employees and work on shift schedule. Staffs works an overnight shift may know as a night auditor. Apart from the typical duties, they also need to handle accounting function. These include closes the book on daily basis, audit of the guest ledger and complete proper financial settlements.
Concierge
This department is function in providing information service and other support help to guests. Typically, it will establish in a luxury hotel to provide more superior service and develop customer loyalty. The staffs should know everything about the city and able to speak several languages.
-Providing the customized service to guests (e.g. coach ticket for sightseeing tours, restaurant reservation, -Assisting the front office to bridge language barriers with guests -Providing area information -Contacting transportation services for guests -Handling all guest mail and information
Housekeeping
The primary roles of the hotel’s housekeeping department are cleaning guest rooms and public area of the hotel. It ensures to provide a clean, comfortable environment for hotel guests to enjoy. It can also maintain and develop the positive image of the hotel.
Laundry Department
This department takes the great responsibility on making sure the cleanliness of the hotel in term of the linen materials. Like the bed linen which is directly related to the guest experience and satisfaction of the hotel performance.
Basis duties of a laundry department: -To clean up linen materials all bed linen, towels, and restaurant linen and staff uniforms -Provide laundry service for the guests
Reference:
Hotel Departments
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_are_the_hotel_departments#slide1
Front Office Department Function in Hotel
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Front_office_department_function_in_hotel#slide5
Yield Management in Hotel Industry
Yield management is the process of understanding, anticipating and influencing consumer behavior in order to maximize profits from a fixed, perishable resource. Yield Management, also called Revenue Management to sell the right product to the right customer at the right time for the price, thereby maximizing revenue.
Therefore maximize revenue in hotel by:
•Pricing: how to price the room rates
•Inventory allocation: how rooms are reserved
•Selling strategy: how to sell the room
Pricing
Hotels use Yield management to calculate the rates based on their hotel’s property, targeting customers and market situation, and like that in order to best maximize return. As occupancy demand increases and room availability decreases, lower rates are closed to sale and only higher rates are available. Hotels today need a base of business in order to cover operational expenses. So, it is impossible to sell all rooms at the same rate.
Therefore, hotel enables a rational pricing structure. For example, there is walk-in corporate, rack rates, balk discount, promotional rate and early bird discount for selling a same room. Customers can be offered a specified price for a room by fulfilled requirement or based on rooms available to sell in order to maximize the profit.
Inventory allocation
In the hotel industry, capacity is regarded as fixed. When the day passes, the unsold rooms cannot generate any revenue and thus can be said to have perished.
Therefore, Yield management teams or sale teams monitor how rooms are reserved by reservation system and react accordingly. There are various inventory controls in hotel. For example, hotel offer discounts on low-season, where the rooms will likely not sell-out. The converse, selling more-expensive rooms when there is excess demand, managing off demand.
Another way of hotel capture varying willingness to pay is to attempt market segmentation. Hotel repackage its basic inventory into different products to this end. Hotel is implementing length of stay, non-refundable rate, or close to arrival. The aim of this is increasing the profit.
Selling strategy
Targeting the right, E-Commerce, also called Online Distribution is a distribution channels that allows selling or marketing hotel online. From search engines, to booking solution sites, to social networks, and to travel marketing sites, there are thousands of ways that bring more exposure and demand nowadays.
References:
Yield management
http://www.hotels.mudransh.com/Hotel_Yield_management_note.pdf
Inventory allocation
http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/JIAHR/issue1/
Selling strategy
http://smartehotels.com/blog/2012/09/28/yield-management-strategies-right-hotel-room-pricing/
Examples of Revenue and Cost Centers in Hotel
For a hotel, there are different room division operations which can generate revenue and incur costs.
Revenue Centers
For profit making, the operations are included the reservations, concierge, communications, Food and Beverage and housekeeping (laundry).
1. Reservations
The staff confirms the booking and the reservations by the guests. The guaranteed reservations are given when the person make the reservation wishes to ensure that the reservation will be held. The guests need to pay an amount of deposit or full payment to reserve the room.
2. Concierge
The staff provides additional tourist information for the guests, for example, helping with restaurant reservations, showing directions, selling tickets to shows.
3. Communications
They are in charge of in-house, guest communications, and emergency center. It can generate profit as hotels generally add a 50% charge to all long-distance calls placed from guest rooms
4. Food and Beverage
F&B can make profits from the sale of food, alcohol, and non-alcoholic beverages in restaurants, lounges, room service, mini-bar, and banquet rooms. It also includes revenue from public room rentals, service charges, and the rental of audio/visual and other meeting room equipment.
5. Housekeeping (laundry services)
As the guests stay longer time in hotel, they may need laundry services. Hotels can charge additional amount for washing and drying guests’ clothes.
Cost Centers
For the operations incurring costs, there are the front office, housekeeping (cleaning activities), guest services and security.
1. Front office
Staff is responsible for selling and up-selling room, maintaining balanced guest accounts, offering services like handling mail, faxes, messages, and local and hotel information.
2. Housekeeping (cleaning activities)
There is the largest number of staff in hotel and they are responsible for the cleanliness activities in the guest rooms and public areas.
3. Guest services
The staff needs to greet the guests when they arrive at the hotel, escort the guests to the front desk, personally allocate the room, and take the guest and luggage to the room.
4. Security
It provides guest safety and loss prevention.
Recent Trends About Operating Rooms Division in Hotels
1. Extensive use of technology
1.1 To facilitate guests
Since business travel becomes popular, businessmen may hold conferences and meeting in hotels. Therefore, hotels are having more advanced equipment in conference rooms and also hotel rooms to facilitate those guests. For some luxury hotels, they may have free wifi coverage in rooms, but some lower fame hotels, most of they only have wifi coverage in hotel lobby and wifi is charged in rooms.
For example, The Park Hyatt Tokyo rents guests a pocket-size mobile Wi-Fi connector to use with an smart phone or laptop to make international calls and get Internet access wherever they go during their stay.
1.2 To facilitate operations and security
In the past, workers had to count sheets, towels, robes, etc. by hand on the way out of the hotel to the laundry and when they come back in order to avoid theft. Some hotels now use small radio frequency ID tags, which transmit radio waves, so that when a cart of laundry passes by a sensor, the numbers of items inside are displayed. So, technology helps to save time and also facilitate the hotels to manage inventory.
2. More customer service-focused
Hotels are using many social media, like Facebook and twitter to communicate with their customers and potential guests. Take Ana Silva O’Reilly as an example, she is a travel blogger and marketing consultant based in London. She posted on Twitter that she would be checking into the Four Seasons Hotel in Milan. Then the hotel responded to her that Four Seasons Hotel was looking forward to her arrival. This action can surprise the customers to make them feel warm and of course to increase customer’s loyalty.
3. Personalization in guest service
Personalization means to provide something according to different guests’ personal needs. Hotels may provide different morning newspapers, lines of bath products, and designed rooms. Also, staff may be trained to remember the guest’s name and preferences. For example, Berkeley hotel in London provides special services for children and baby-sitting by prior appointment. These personalized guest services satisfy their guests.
4.Educating guests of environmental works
In order to reduce the use of resources, like water and cleaning supplies to wash the towels, hotels encourage guests to reuse the towels during their living days unless the towels are dirty and are needed to be replaced by new one. Also, hotels may not replace the bath supplies (shampoo, shower gel) unless the guests have checked out or requested by guests. These actions help to elevating environmental consciousness of guests and reduce the waste of resources in hotels.
5. Front line staff are multilingual
Due to the increase in globalized travel, the requirements, especially language requirement of front line staff are getting higher. Staff working in front office, housekeeping, concierge and guest service get in touch with customers from different countries every day. Therefore, able to speak local language is not enough. Most staff is required to be able to speak two or even three languages fluently in order to communicate with their guests. Since Chinese like to go travel to some developed countries, able to speak Putonghua is an advantage to staff who works in hotel.
6. Reducing workload on housekeeping
Hotels now encourage guests who stay more than one night that if they think that the room, especially the bed do not need to be tidied up again, guests can put the sign on the door handle or on bed so the housekeeper will only handle the waste disposal. This helps to reduce the workload on housekeeping.
Reference:
Top Hotel Technology Trends in 2012, by Ted Horner
http://hotelexecutive.com/business_review/2888/top-hotel-technology-trends-in-2012
Hotel’s facebook
1. Four Seasons https://www.facebook.com/FourSeasonsHotelHongKong
2. Ritz Carlton https://www.facebook.com/ritzcarltonhongkong
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