While the spotlight often shines on the front-facing aspects of hospitality, there’s an unsung hero that can play a pivotal role in your hotel’s success: the hotel reservation team.
NB: This is an article from Revinate
Your hotel reservation team’s expertise extends far beyond just facilitating bookings. They shape a guest’s first impression of your hotel, manage room allocation, enable seamless synchronization among departments, and play a key role in ensuring each guest departs with lasting memories.
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They’re the secret ingredient that can elevate a guest’s stay from ordinary to extraordinary.
Read on to discover how to build this vital backstage force, and manage it in a way that will help transform a mere functional hotel into one that excels in service, efficiency, and profitability.
How to set up your hotel reservation team
When developing a hotel reservation team, the first step is to create an organization chart. This is the blueprint for efficient and effective operations. Depending on the size of your hotel, your organization chart may include some or all of these roles.
Reservations Manager: At the top of the chart sits the manager, steering the team’s strategy, and establishing coordination between the reservation team and other hotel departments.
Reservations Supervisor: Reporting to the manager, supervisors act as right-hand partners to the manager, guiding agents in daily tasks, providing training, handling escalating issues, and making certain the team operates smoothly.
Reservation Agents: These are your frontline warriors, managing customer inquiries, booking reservations, monitoring rates across platforms, and providing personalized service to boost customer delight.
Reservation Assistants: Agent expertise is supported by assistants who handle administrative tasks, data entry, and offer other supplementary aid.
Front desk support staff: These team members serve as liaisons between the reservations team and the front desk, ensuring smooth guest check-ins and providing crucial real-time information.
This hierarchical structure promotes clear communication, task delegation, and cooperation between departments and roles. It will help you maximize efficiency and enhance customer engagement.
Reservations teams and interdepartmental collaboration
Effective collaboration between a hotel reservation team and other departments is essential for delivering exceptional visitor experiences and streamlining operations. By aligning efforts with departments such as Management, Housekeeping, Sales, Front Desk, and Marketing, you create a powerful synergy. The reservation team becomes the central communication hub, creating a unified customer journey that exceeds expectations and elevates your hotel’s reputation.
Reservations and management
Your hotel reservation team can coordinate closely with management, offering essential real-world data for forecasting availability, sales, staff scheduling needs, and to guide decision-making. Because agents continually monitor rates, they can also help management secure competitive positioning. Of course, reservation agents should have call center software that makes reporting on these areas simple.
In addition, agents’ understanding of customer expectations enables management to make swift adjustments to accommodate specific guests’ needs or changes in guest count.
