Assisting in managing a hotel – what did I learn?

Interested in a career in recreation, park or tourism?  Well then, the Recreation, Park, Tourism Career Fair is the place to go.  The School of Public Heath Career Services Office is holding a fair for careers in this field on Wednesday, January 25 from 9:30am – 1:30pm.  There is a Panel in PH125 from 9:30 – 10:30am and a Fair in Gym 163 from 10:30am – 1:30pm.  If there is any interest or curiosity that you may have in these potential career paths, then attending this event would be extremely beneficial for your career prospective.  There will be 60 participating employers so any career path you have interest in should be covered at the fair.  This is a great opportunity for you to make connections and as well as gain substantial knowledge about this career field.

One field that fits into this career path is hotel management.  If you are interested in running a hotel one day, this career path is the one you should take.  Having assisted in running a hotel for the past five years, I have been able to gain substantial knowledge in this field.  Running a hotel creates different challenges every day.  The main challenge is pleasing customers to the best of your ability, which is the number one goal for any hotel manager.  Helping run a larger hotel that holds numerous customers at once can make this task difficult as anyone, spending money to have a room, is expecting everything to be perfect.  The goal for a hotel manager is to make this a reality. However, sometimes inconvenient situations will happen and it becomes hard to guarantee complete customer satisfaction.  The best quality to have in this situation is to stay calm and work through the situation.  Many customers get extremely heated when something goes wrong on their vacation or business travel and it is important to try to calm them down instead of engaging in an argument.  Travelers have an abundance of options available to them when deciding where they want to stay so it is vital that you make sure every customer wants to come back to your hotel and that they recommend the hotel to their family and friends.

Other tasks that are challenging include when the hotel is under renovations.  The hotel I help in managing was under renovation a few years ago and there are many challenges that come with that.  The first challenge is to make sure that customers who are staying at the hotel during renovations are not disturbed and that they can still enjoy their stay.  Another challenge is having to deal with fewer rooms available.  The hotel renovations are done section by section so that the hotel can still run but with this comes the difficulty of having to fill up all the other rooms as profit is being lost while rooms are under construction.  It can be difficult to fill up all the other rooms as ongoing construction is a turnoff for some people and that is why it is important to make sure past customers have been treated respectfully so that minor details such as construction would not deter them from staying at the hotel again.

There are many challenges as a hotel manager but if you do everything possible to make sure the customers are pleased with their stay, the smile on their face will be leaving you with a smile of your own.

 

A Californian looking to explore the deep sea while living the life of a Hoosier studying sport marketing and management!

By Neil Patel
Neil Patel Blogger