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More info
- Be the first person guests speak to at the hotel, providing a welcome and managing guest services
- You'll meet lots of interesting people and need to be friendly, professional and well organised
- Opportunities to progress into management roles and to work around the world
Hotel receptionists ensure guests are comfortable and have a relaxing stay, dealing with any problems or complaints smoothly and professionally.
Your day-to-day tasks may include dealing with bookings, completing procedures when guests arrive and leave, choosing rooms and handing out keys, preparing bills and taking payments, taking and passing on messages to guests, dealing with special requests from guests (like booking theatre tickets or storing valuable items), answering questions, and dealing with complaints or problems.
You'll usually work as part of a team and you may be responsible for one area like managing telephone reservations or guest departures (checkouts). In small hotels, your duties may include other tasks like showing guests to their rooms or serving drinks in the bar.
With experience and qualifications, you may be able to progress to front office manager or hotel manager. You could also move into different areas of hotel work, like events and banqueting services, sales, personnel or accounts. You could also move outside the hospitality industry into related areas like customer service and administration.
You'll need
For this role, you'll need thoroughness and attention to detail; excellent customer service, administration and verbal communication skills; sensitivity, understanding and the ability to understand people's reactions; patience in stressful situations; and to work well with others.
You can do a college course in hospitality for this job, or through a hospitality team member intermediate apprenticeship.
You can also start work as an admin assistant or general staff in a hotel and do further training and qualifications on the job.
Direct application for this job is possible if you've got good administration and customer service skills. IT skills would also be useful in order to work with computerised booking and payment systems. Many employers will want you to have a good standard of general education, including GCSE grades at 9 to 4 (A* to C) in maths and English.
You may find it useful if you can speak in a second language, as a lot of hotels get visitors from outside the UK.