Making the Life of a Front Desk Executive Easier

A front desk executive is the first person that a guest encounters upon check-in so he needs to be presentable and must display professional attitude in order to entice the guests. A front desk executive is the backbone of a hotel as everything depends on him. The position involves great organizational skills like arranging rooms, assigning tasks to the housekeeping, entering guest details, handling cash and most importantly keeping the guests’ happy.  In smaller hotels, it is usually the owner or manager who ends up doubling as the front desk executive.

Let’s look at some of the many tasks of a front desk executive in a small hotel; from the time he enters the hotel, till he leaves for the day:

– Receive and process information

– Check-in/check-out guests

– Manage calls, messages and respond to mails

– Maintain guest management & guest history

– Respond to guests’ inquiries

– Co-ordinate with housekeeping team, F&B services & in-house admin duties

– Manage reservations and co-ordinate with travel agents

– Look into staff requirements and provide training

– Handle reports and billing

The list goes on and the front desk executive is expected to be adaptable, confident, friendly and put up a smiling face through all this. Handling these duties become tiresome and monotonous on a daily basis. It definitely looks easy from outside but it’s quite a bit of a job inside.

An overworked front desk executive is prone to making errors and some errors can cause serious damage to the hotel’s reputation. Since hospitality industry is mainly about customer service, if you end up losing your guests, it can have serious repercussions on your business.

The solution to all these problems lies in a property management system that helps automate the hotel operations.

Importance of a PMS in Hospitality Industry

Hospitality industry runs on the fundamentals of organized management. As the business expands, data management and maintenance can become unmanageable. A property management system is the only solution as it takes control of the data corresponding to the aspects of a hotel. PMS is an integration of various elements like bookings, reports, accounting, staff management etc. – all of these handled on a single screen.

Look at the multiple benefits of a property management system for a front desk executive:

– Access reservations, online bookings, check-in/check-out, billing and more from anywhere and at any time.

– Handle the pressure of data management which otherwise consumes a lot of time. With a PMS, all data records can be stored digitally, thereby doing away with the paperwork. Also, all the data is stored in cloud making it highly secure at all the times.

– Experience real-time room inventory updation to make your life easier.

– Track guests’ requests for better customer service.

– Assign tasks to housekeeping to make sure the rooms are cleaned.

– Track and analyze the occupancy, housekeeping and other department performance using all the reports generated.

– Manage multiple properties at separate locations. In short, you can manage reservations, online distribution information and much more from one system.

Happy Executives, Happy Customers

When the hotel operations become automated, the staff will have more time to emphasize on enhancing guest experience.  Successful hotels have moved away from ledger sheets and embraced the power of cloud PMS to streamline the hotel operations. For small and mid-sized hotels, the exorbitant IT & maintenance costs of legacy systems are a big disadvantage, so hotels should look at cloud based technology which will eliminate high implementation costs and eradicate manual processes.

Observe this: The next time you see a front desk executive smile at you, know it is a PMS doing his job.