Behind every successful hospitality establishment, there is a bunch of highly motivated personnel. From a valet, bellboy, front office staff, and housekeeping supervisor to even the general manager, they all come together with one aim – serving guests efficiently. In this piece today, we will talk about two significant profiles at a hotel – the Front Office Managers and the IT Managers.
Let’s talk about Front Office Managers.
Front office managers handle many duties as one of the most critical guest-facing employees. It includes managing staff, providing guest service, communicating with other teams and ensuring the smooth running of the hotel’s operations.
If first impressions are always important, the front office manager ensures that the second guests walk into the lobby. From the moment they greet guests until the final checkout wearing a friendly smile, their conduct makes all the difference. They are good at many guest-facing things, including anticipating guests’ needs, responding to their emotions and making the right decision at the right time to manage any untoward situation.
No doubt, front office managers are one of the most critical hires. Their day starts with a team briefing that looks at arrivals, departures, special requests, etc. It is always followed by assigning tasks to other front office staff. They train new front desk staff and supervise their workload and performance. They are responsible for handling reservations, guest registration, room and rate assignment, guest services, updating room status, settling the guest account, and creating guest history records.
How do they use technology?
They need the right technology solution to execute tasks, as mentioned above. From assigning rooms to guests for faster check-ins to generating guest folios for hassle-free checkouts, front office managers rely on technology. In this context, they need a robust yet easy-to-use Hotel Property Management System (Hotel PMS) to do everything that exceeds guest expectations. Also, they must be well-versed with the Hotel PMS to train new joiners in the front office team.
We will now look at IT Managers.
While the front office manager can be considered the face of a hotel, their counterparts in the IT department are mostly backstage actors, yet they also play a critical role. These are the personnel responsible for supporting all IT infrastructure, network/server/workstation/PABX/email account configuration, and many more at the property. It is also pretty important for them to deploy the right solution to prevent data theft that otherwise has a severe adverse impact on a hotel’s brand value.
With technology, guest expectations, and business dynamics changing rapidly, IT Managers have become an essential part of the hotel operations team. For example, if the hotel is running on an on-premise solution, they need to advise the management to migrate to the cloud to become more agile and stay relevant in the long run. Not only this, they need to evaluate several hospitality tech vendors before selecting the right one based on the hotel’s requirements, budget, and long-term goals.
How do they use technology?
The IT Manager’s role becomes all the more critical when we look at a hotel group. Group IT Managers need to select a cloud-based multi-property management system that would offer much-needed centralized control over member property operations. They need to ensure that all the systems are up and running all the time as intended and the management is getting all the business-critical reports to make data-driven decisions. Most importantly, they must recommend using the right solution to help the management with their digitization efforts while saving overhead costs for instant ROI.
They both need Hotelogix!
Yes, they both need Hotelogix, the industry-first multi-property management system, to execute their tasks efficiently and add to the growth of their hospitality entities. We have helped over 250+ hotel groups increase occupancy, sell at the best rates, serve guests better and enhance revenues. Moreover, in what could be termed a testament to our capabilities, we successfully executed a massive multi-property deployment of over 50000+ rooms across 500+ hotels under a single group. Not only this, as part of this one-of-a-kind 100% remote-only deployment, we have also trained 5000+ hotel staff entirely online.
We have partnered with Hotelier India, a leading hospitality industry publication, to recognize IT Person of the Year and Front Office Manager of the Year at the Hotelier India Awards 2022, scheduled to take place on December 19, 2022.