Front Desk Development Hanoi Hilton Opera House
Dinh, Trang (2018)
Laurea-ammattikorkeakoulu
2018
All rights reserved
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2018060412470
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2018060412470
Tiivistelmä
Hotel activities are divided into two major activity systems including front office and back office. Dealing directly with customers, hotel staffs are interacting with guests in various manners, from receiving room reservation, check-in, check-out, to handling guest’s complaints, public relations, and so on (Lewis Perry 2008, 6).
Front office staff is of great importance in caring about reservation-related issues and making good impression to guests from the first moment they enter the hotel lobby. In another word, front office adds value to hotel by interacting directly with customers that affect sales revenue of the hotel (Lewis Perry 2008, 27).
As a component of Front office, front-desk representative can be seen as the first impression of the hotel because front-desk employees bear the first touch with guests. Front-desk representative implements tasks including using equipment such as computer or printer, handling check-in and check-out procedure, serving guests during their stay. Those assignments require them sufficient qualifications to be able to accomplish such tasks. Therefore, qualifications of front-desk employee, in another word, influence their performance particularly, and quality of hotel in general, especially at high-class hotels which demand high qualifications from front-desk staffs.
During internship time at Hilton Hanoi Opera, there exist several phenomena at front-desk service that made bad impression on guests. To seek the answer for the main question about the necessary conditions for the development of front desk operations, the research approaches the perspectives of managers and staff from other departments via an in-depth interview, and at the same time, it surveys the opinions of customers about the quality of front desk service they perceived while staying in the hotel. To identify the gap between customer expectations and what are actually delivered by the front desk services, a gap analysis is conducted. It combines the results of the survey regarding customer expectation about the significant service areas that need improvements in a classification panel where customers are required to clarify whether their expectations are met by the service staffs. The undelivered values are considered the problems need to be worked on to enhance the performance of the front desk.
Research results reveals that while language proficiency and effective communication are significant factors that can leverage the satisfactions of the customers when working with the front desks in such a diverse business environment where customers are coming from all over the World, staffs of this department haven’t completely perform these skills up to the expectations of the customers and co-workers from other departments. These problems lead to misunderstandings and mistakes during working process, prolong the time needed to perform the tasks, and therefore lower the effectiveness of the operations in general.
Front office staff is of great importance in caring about reservation-related issues and making good impression to guests from the first moment they enter the hotel lobby. In another word, front office adds value to hotel by interacting directly with customers that affect sales revenue of the hotel (Lewis Perry 2008, 27).
As a component of Front office, front-desk representative can be seen as the first impression of the hotel because front-desk employees bear the first touch with guests. Front-desk representative implements tasks including using equipment such as computer or printer, handling check-in and check-out procedure, serving guests during their stay. Those assignments require them sufficient qualifications to be able to accomplish such tasks. Therefore, qualifications of front-desk employee, in another word, influence their performance particularly, and quality of hotel in general, especially at high-class hotels which demand high qualifications from front-desk staffs.
During internship time at Hilton Hanoi Opera, there exist several phenomena at front-desk service that made bad impression on guests. To seek the answer for the main question about the necessary conditions for the development of front desk operations, the research approaches the perspectives of managers and staff from other departments via an in-depth interview, and at the same time, it surveys the opinions of customers about the quality of front desk service they perceived while staying in the hotel. To identify the gap between customer expectations and what are actually delivered by the front desk services, a gap analysis is conducted. It combines the results of the survey regarding customer expectation about the significant service areas that need improvements in a classification panel where customers are required to clarify whether their expectations are met by the service staffs. The undelivered values are considered the problems need to be worked on to enhance the performance of the front desk.
Research results reveals that while language proficiency and effective communication are significant factors that can leverage the satisfactions of the customers when working with the front desks in such a diverse business environment where customers are coming from all over the World, staffs of this department haven’t completely perform these skills up to the expectations of the customers and co-workers from other departments. These problems lead to misunderstandings and mistakes during working process, prolong the time needed to perform the tasks, and therefore lower the effectiveness of the operations in general.