Hotel receptionist: skills to foster and things to know

The demand for hospitality field specialists has been continuously growing worldwide. It means that entering the industry gives you a great opportunity to build a prosperous career in guest services – a market that will not go low, according to the forecasts.

In fact, a hotel receptionist role is often seen as a starting platform from which you can launch your professional progression within the hospitality sector: proving this point, a lot of senior hotel managers have commenced at the front desk and worked their way up the ladder.

The responsibilities of hotel receptionists comprise: “accommodating hotel, motel, and resort patrons by registering and assigning rooms to guests, issuing room keys or cards, transmitting and receiving messages, keeping records of occupied rooms and guests’ accounts, making and confirming reservations, presenting statements to and collecting payments from departing guests”.

Which skills do you need to master to get the job as a hotel receptionist? Which professional peculiarities you need to keep in mind? Find out some essential information here below:

Being a people person: extravert, well-mannered, and serviceable

Working as a receptionist is exciting but also quite challenging: you are the face of the hotel, the first person the guests talk to upon their arrival, not counting a doorman. Thus, the job is indeed suitable for candidates who are able to provide an extremely friendly and at the same time elegantly courteous welcoming approach to everyone. As a receptionist, you need to represent the main values of the hotel and guarantee the guests’ satisfaction. Professional standards imply that you are caring and attentive: “understanding how that guest is feeling and being empathetic can provide comfort to guests as an overall experience factor”.

Maintaining a great composure

In many cases, front desk workers need to multitask, serving phone calls and various guests all at once. That is why a good employee holding this position must be able to stay calm and professional under pressure, juggling the tasks while still being friendly to customers and sticking to the phone etiquette. The job requires mental flexibility, a nice professional appearance, highly developed stress management competence, and great tolerance.

Being resourceful and creative

It might not sound like the most creative job in the world, but it actually requires a lot of creativity: guests often address receptionists with strange requests, and the hotel clerks have to be both reactive and useful, even when a request is difficult to solve. In fact, the front desk staff is usually trained “to be extremely resourceful, to think on their feet and come up with creative solutions to different situations”.

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