The leading guide to managing profitable hotel operations. Extensively revised to reflect the industry’s rapid changes, this widely popular guide presents rich detail about best practices and future directions in the hotel industry, while offering the widest coverage of any book in the field. Readers gain an intuitive understanding based on the flow of the guest’s experience, from reservation, arrival, and registration, to service purchasing, departure, billing, and recordkeeping. The entire rooms division is covered thoroughly, and linked to other hospitality functions, related industries, and the broader economy. Coverage includes internationalization; green operations; financing sources; boutique and urban collections; and reservations strategies. Check-in Managing Hotel Operations, 10/e has been updated throughout to cover such current topics such as detail cancellation policies for major OTA channels, leading-edge technology and reservations, mobile apps and devices, global distribution, third-party housing poachers or pirates, conflicts over master billing, EMV technology and the rising popularity of smart cards, night audit reports, cyber security in the hospitality industry, and much more. Included are over 150 exhibits to promote visual learning.
I rotated through several departments in a 5-star Asian hotel, working for housekeeping, banquets, reservations, front desk, bell desk, and marketing. This book is especially valuable for those who work for front desk. This department is covered thoroughly and after reading the book you will have a good understanding of how things really work and why.
The structure itself is logical and follows the way a guest encounters products and services of a property.
The first part introduces readers to hotel industry in general, covering hotel types, major indicators, market types, ownership structures, and a sample organization structure for a full service hotel.
The next part is focused on reservations. Here you learn what happens before the guest arrives to the hotel.
Next chapters deal with all the services upon arrival. There is a nice flow chart showing how a guest progresses through his stay. Emphasis here is on check-in process: room rates, room assignment, managing arrival population, etc.
Billing, night audit and technologies are explained in the last part of the book.
If you are in operations, I would suggest to skip general information about industry and concentrate on forecasting, check-in and billing. Chapters 4, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12 were the best in explaining to me the whole process.
I also liked that authors left plenty of margin space on the sides. For those of you who like to take notes, this book is very convenient.
With all that said, I believe a few things could be improved: 1) The name "Managing hotel operations" might be a bit misleading, since not all of hotel operations are covered. For example, there is no information on housekeeping, maintenance, and food and beverage departments. If you are looking for a book covering these areas you would need to look somewhere else. 2) Forecasting chapter deals with technical day-to-day forecasting. Important questions on how to set up rates, how to make a forecast for a year in advance, for 3 months in advance are left out. Perhaps because front desk agents don't need to concern themselves too much with long range planning that information was left out. In any case, long term planning was not explained here. 3) Front desk shifts were briefly mentioned. I feel there were not enough details about specific duties of each shift (morning, afternoon; night audit was covered). What is a good time to block group rooms? How should communication between bell desk, housekeeping, and room service operate?
Overall, a great resource to learn about front desk operations.