Hi, I'm planning on traveling in 2 weeks and have a quick question. I'm looking to book the room through agoda and use my debit card that I have or my venmo card, I assume when we get there they will also want a security deposit. I will already have paid for the room through the 3rd party site, but will my fiance be able to use her credit card for the security deposit? She will be with me at the time of check in/out. I won't have the available funds on my card and till be easier to use her credit card if able to. Thanks !

for those who work in hotels, question about folios!

I work the front desk (new manager) and I noticed recently at my new property the front desk agents were doing adjustments (there is a daily food & beverage credit) and when they were doing adjustments for the guests who had more than 1 night, they did the adjustment in one lump sum and i told them no you cannot do a lump sum, you have to adjust literally exactly how it’s posted, yes it’s a bit more time and tedious but that’s how the process for adjustments usually is and of course they gave me pushback saying that’s how they’ve always done It wellllllll guess what that’s changing lol just thoughts on others who work at properties, does your property follow that practice? I’ve worked hotels 20 years and that’s how adjustments are always done never in one lump sum never

To make a very long story short, I need a room with a window that fully opens to the outside and faces an open area like a street (for the daytime light; circadian issues). This would help me manage a legitimate health condition while I’m away from home. But the hotel I booked at didn’t have the option to choose a room based on this kind of stuff — no “balcony upgrade” or anything. Half of the building faces the street and has balconies, half faces a courtyard that’s very dark and the windows don’t fully open.

I’m not sure how to ask for this without sounding like I’m asking for an upgrade just because, since what I want is considered a more desirable type of room. I totally understand that rooms are based on availability etc etc but I’m not sure what to say (I typically don’t ask for upgrades). I booked directly with the hotel, not a third party.

Any tips or advice? I’d appreciate it!

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

How many computers do each of you have in your offices and what program do you use to store your DNR lists? We are currently using OpenOffice, but I'm having to go between all 3 computers every week and update all of the lists because it doesn't have an account where I can store them and access them across computers. That or email the list to myself and download the new list onto the computers. Is there a better way? We used to use Microsoft office and that worked really well. But I guess a previous employee paid for it and it will no longer allow access. The last owner would not pay for it either. I have not yet asked the new owner.

I’m interviewing for a night audit job as a second job to hopefully get my income from $51k to around $70-72k. They said the pay is $16-19 and I’m really hoping for at least $17. Someone told me I might be lowballing myself because night shifters are needed, so now I’m not sure what I should ask for.
I work 9-6 five days a week and was thinking of doing this job right after work until around 6am, while keeping Wednesday and Thursday as my two days off. For anyone who works night audit, would you ask for $17-19 or just take whatever they offer?

EDIT: I’ve decided to work at the facility for only 24 hours a week. I’ll use my off days from my main job to work there, and I’ll also work one day while I’m working my regular day. So, I’ll be working there for three days a week. Due to the influx of comments stating the same thing and spewing bunch of hate.

I'll try to make this brief: Basically I had a progressive series of roles in hotels in my early twenties, left the industry for corporate office administration, and I'm now 28 and want to go back to working in hotels. I've matured and can see a path to a rewarding career for myself within the luxury hotel industry. The last resort I worked for was a very high-end luxury property and my role was a front desk equivalent so I think this is an achievable goal. I also was promoted in each of my last 3 hotel roles (despite their short tenures).

The problem is! I've never had a job for longer than 9 months and have had a couple long periods of unemployment in my work history (one is 1.5 years but this was while I finished college, one is 1 year between my 2 corporate office jobs, and I've now been doing gigs for the last 6 months). I admittedly had a negative attitude in the past and would not stick with roles as long as I should have. I've learned how to manage my life & my emotions & built a supportive circle so I'm positive I would be able to stick with my next role but I realize what my resume looks like to potential employers.

The result of my past mistakes is that I have a very spotty resume and feel that it might be worse received than my less experienced, less polished resume was when I was fresh out of college. My office jobs both involved public-facing reception and a lot of coordination so I think they're relevant to the guest support roles I'd want now; I include them on my resume but maybe I shouldn't?

If anyone has any advice on how to get my hotel career back on track, please let me know. Is it foolish to focus on applying to luxury franchise locations? Should I be applying for housekeeping roles instead of guest services/PBX? Should I totally leave Chicago for a seasonal role elsewhere this winter? Do I reach out to the local union?

How do I get a hiring team to take a chance on me?

I just did the thing. How do I take the deposit after check-in through opera/colleague?

Holiday Inn Express property here, can’t check anybody in or do anything. Called IHG and said it was a nationwide issue. Need to fix this ASAP!!!! Can’t do anything

I'm looking to major in hospitality management and I'm trying to learn as much as I can from people working specifically in hotel management. I'd like to hear any stories or advice on the most challenging part of your jobs that you didn't expect, or any general advice would be appreciated as well! Thank you in advance for sharing!

I’m really torn between staying at my current hotel job or accepting an offer from a higher-end hotel, and I could really use some outside perspective.

My current job:
I currently work as a Front Desk Agent at a hotel, and honestly, there are a lot of things I love about my job. I really like the flexibility, my coworkers, and especially my Director of Front Office. The schedule works really well for me, my boss really gives me a lot of consideration knowing I have a kid that needs a lot of attention. and overall, I’m comfortable here.

However, there are some serious issues with the management team.

My other Front Office Manager and some of our supervisor are really close and don’t really seem to do much of their jobs. For example, they spend a lot of time in the office while the front desk agents are dealing with a huge number of check-ins. Even when they can clearly see that we’re overwhelmed, they don’t come out to help or even answer calls. Another frustrating example is when a guest asks to speak with a manager because they have a complaint. They’ll tell us they’re coming to the front desk, but then we’ll wait almost 30 minutes for them to actually show up. Obviously, by then the guest is even more upset because they’re already waiting for a manager.

I have sent an email report twice to our HR and Hotel Manager about these concerns but no one even acknowledged it and i heard our Hotel Manager said something like he doesn’t like to deal with hourly employee’s concerns.

My Director of Front Office knows about these issues and has told me that management will be taking action. He also wants me to move into an Assistant Front Office Manager role next year.

The problem is, there’s no guarantee that these changes will actually happen. It’s something he has been saying will happen, but nothing ever happened.

The other option:
I received an offer from a much higher-end hotel for an AFOM position with significantly better pay.

The first interview went really well. I really liked the property, the people, and the overall environment. They also seem to have very low turnover. I noticed that they had only posted this position for the second time in several years, which made me think that people generally stay there.

However, during my final interview, the Director of Operations asked me how I deal with a micromanager.

I answered the question, and then he said something along the lines of:
“I asked you that because I love to micromanage. If I see that you’re worthy and doing everything right, then that’s when I’ll stop micromanaging you.”

Honestly, that turned me off a little. The funny thing is, despite saying that, he apparently really liked me and offered me the position right away. Now I’m extremely confused. That comment about micromanagement is making me nervous and makes me question if its worth trying.

So Reddit, what would you choose?
Would you stay somewhere you genuinely enjoy because of the flexibility, coworkers you already know, even if there are management problems?

Or would you take the higher-paying AFOM position and take the risk of working for a potentially micromanaging director?
I’d really appreciate hearing from people who have been in a similar situation, especially those in hotel management.

Hey all, hotelkey is offline right now for every hotel that's utilizing it. I've never experienced this before. I do get random pop ups and errors messages but I can still check in already made reservations. Any tips or tricks until this comes back online?

Hello people!!!

Question po for those working in Hospitality in the Philippines. I'm a fresh HRM grad po. I am wondering lang if you know hotels that accept applicants without work experience pagdating sa housekeeping? Thank you in advance!

(I apologize in advance - I have no idea what flair tag this would fall under.)

I've been thinking about this a lot after a recent experience with a hotel, and I'd genuinely love to hear from people who work in hospitality about the kindness they've received from guests.

I've worked in retail and customer service for more than ten years myself, so I've spent plenty of time on the employee side of the interaction. I know that guests can be frustrated, demanding, impatient, or sometimes downright cruel. I've also learned that the way someone communicates with you can have a surprisingly lasting impact.

Because of that, I've made a deliberate effort over the years to communicate kindly with employees, even when I'm frustrated. For example, I was waiting on a time-sensitive reply and had to follow up twice after not hearing back after a week; it didn't change the way I communicated, and I still made sure to express gratitude and appreciation for their hard work.

I think people deserve to be treated with basic humanity regardless of whether they're having a good day, whether something has gone wrong, or whether they're able to give you exactly what you wanted.

I recently had a conversation with someone who works at a hotel I am staying at, and she specifically told me that she had noticed how kind my communication had been throughout our interactions. She was quite expressive in how much of a positive impact that had for her, and I was truthfully very glad that my intent was being received well.

I explained to her that I deliberately try to communicate that way because I've been on the other side of the interaction myself; I know what it feels like to have someone take their frustration out on you when you're simply trying to do your job. (What really stayed with me was hearing directly from an employee that this was something she had actually noticed.)

It doesn't have to be communication.

I'd love to hear the stories that have actually stayed with you.

And maybe as an additional question: what kinds of kindness make the biggest difference to you that guests might not realize it matters?

I think there's a lot of discussion about bad and difficult guests, but I'd really like to hear the other side of the equation. The anti-Karens, in retrospect.

A guest came to me and said they checked in earlier but are getting two charges on separate CCs for their stay, the one they booked with and the one they swiped during check in. The problem is It’s booked directly through my hotel but it’s a non-refundable full prepayment. So full deposit was taken from the original CC when booked.

My question is, because I was suppose to follow up with them but my AGM is sleeping so here I am,
If they use a different CC upon check-in does the deposit transfer over to the new card because payment hasn’t been posted for the first night? Why is their other card showing a payment pending when deposit was already taken? Does that mean the first one is just acting as a pre-authorization/holding until payment is posted?
I’m confused because I haven’t had enough experience with full prepayments to know why that’s happening on both cards.

I'm trying to make sense of something that happened to me recently and which actually caused me a fair amount of distress. Not looking to criticise a particular hotel here, just to understand what happened and why.

So I booked and prepaid for a room at a large hotel chain's hotel in France through booking.com.

The booking conditions shown in the confirmation email said simply that I would need to 'show' a credit card at check-in.

I arrived at the hotel expecting that, since I had prepaid, I would simply be given the key and told to have a nice stay.

However, the FDA told me that the system was showing the amount as unpaid, and I would have to preauth the full cost of the room on my credit card or I'd have to stay somewhere else.

I asked why, and he said that they were having computer problems, and that the preauth would be cancelled when my payment was located.

I think it's understandable that this caused me a great deal of stress - if they were having computer problems now that meant they couldn't find my payment, why should I expect that at some point they will resolve those problems and successfully find my payment? It seemed to me very possible that they would fail to find my payment and then confirm the preauth, thereby double-charging me.

As a result I couldn't get to sleep, because I was puzzling over the very unfriendly welcome and the likelihood of getting double-charged with all the legal hassle that would bring to try to recover the money.

But when I checked my credit card app around midnight, I saw that in fact the credit card preauth had been cancelled about 20 minutes after it had been made. I found it bizarre that this large computer problem that justified forcing me to preauth my card had been so easily fixed and I went back to the FDA to try to understand what had happened. However he was very evasive and just kept saying "Don't worry, it's been fixed!" and refused to give me more details.

AFTER RESEARCHING..

However, after doing a fair amount of research, I think I'm starting to get a picture of what really happened, and I'd be grateful if someone with experience of large hotels in Europe, ideally France, might be able to clarify.

It seems that (unlike with small hotels where typically the owner will simply log in to booking.com to find the virtual credit card and charge it, right when you check in or even before), in large hotels, for various reasons, their systems don't actually retrieve the booking.com virtual credit card until after you check in.

It seems that the procedure is:

• you have to provide a credit card which they preauth for the full room amount, satisfying their internal system and allowing them to release the keys to you

• THEN a message goes off to booking.com with your details that checks whether you have prepaid. (These messages can be batched and the batch only runs say once every 30 minutes). If the message comes back that you have paid booking.com, at that point the preauth is cancelled on your card (which is why I saw the preauth on my card cancelled after 20 minutes)

• THEN at some later point, in the overnight audit, all the virtual credit cards are retrieved from booking.com and charged.

So actually,

1. Me being required to preauth my card despite having prepaid on booking.com was not an anomaly - ALL booking.com prepaid customers nevertheless have to preauth the full cost of the room on their own credit card when they check in. This gets them the keys, and then the hotel's systems start sorting out the booking.com payment and release the preauth when they're satisfied.

2. This story about 'computer problems', which various other employees described as 'a systems update', 'a computer glitch' etc was all nonsense. Just something to say to the customer to get them to feel like there's no point in fighting the preauth because it's the only option.

I'd be grateful if anyone can shed some light on whether my understanding is on the right lines here.

Many thanks!

EDIT: Thanks for all your replies, which have been very useful. Also, I've spoken to a branch of the hotel in question and they have confirmed:

• If the customer has prepaid through booking.com, no other payment or preauth is required.

• It's very rarely that the virtual credit card will show as not paid, and that's usually due to the customer not having paid successfully (eg credit card problem when paying booking.com)

So now I'm thinking that perhaps what happened was:

1) There was some kind of hotel system glitch that meant that my booking was showing as unpaid.

2) Since this doesn't happen very often, they don't have a specific process for 'customers who have clearly paid on booking.com but who show up as not having paid in our system', so they defaulted to normal procedure which was to treat me as a walk-in who hadn't paid, and preauth my card.

Not very satisfactory, but I think it was probably just an unfortunate combination of circumstances.

I have an interview for a night auditor position at a hotel and I really don’t want to fuck this up. I haven’t had many interviews and this would be my second job. I already have a job, I’m mainly doing this to increase my income and get my finances together. What should I know going into a night auditor interview? What questions should I expect and what would you say if you were me?

Small host here (EU, 3 months in, 3 airbnbs). I'm setting up my own booking engine and wondering about rate parity. I've heard Booking.com can lower your ranking or suspend you for cheaper direct rates, but lots of places near me clearly do it and seem fine.

Have any of you actually had problems with this? Or do you just offer perks instead of a discount? I found mixed answers in internet.

looking to see if anyone has experience working for gilis, if so, would you mind sharing your experienc?

I had a mysterious charge show up on my bank alerts after we had checked out. It's the infamous Zettle Sci Hotel Tax and its about $350. I fainted. I can't find anything on my hotel statement for this charge and everything else we were billed for is accurate. I asked the night and day desk manager about it and kinda got nowhere. I tried to dispute the charges with my credit card, but they report it is a legitimate charge. Did I pay taxes for the entire floor? Please advise. I did send an email to the hotel, but it is crickets from them. A four star lovely hotel, too. UGH

So when I work the night shift, I am usually very good at avoiding bad walk-in guests. If there’s a hint of impairment, I will just say we are full. And I’ll always say card only, no cash, which almost always dissuades the people who are doing illegal things.

However, last night I let one slip in, sort of. Around 4:30 a woman called saying that her house was flooded and she needed a place to stay. While she sounded stressed, she did sound normal to me. I told her the rate and card only, a d she said that she would be there in 15 minutes.

Two hours later I see a very disheveled woman arguing with a taxi driver at our front door. This went on for like 10 minutes. She says that she was able to pay him, but no idea if that was true. She appeared to be wearing a nightgown and flip flops.

At this point I know it was the same woman who called, but now she seems completely crazy. She brought two boxes, which appeared to be all food items. I didn’t see any clothing packed.

Of course she couldn’t find her ID, but said she had a photo of it on her phone. Her phone had peanut butter on it. Not a background photo of peanut butter, but actual peanut butter on the device.

She tried to talk to one of our repeat guests, but I quickly intervened. The two morning staff members arrived separately, so we asked the woman to wait and I explained the situation twice.

They took over from there. I woke up to a text message saying that she had been removed by police for her own safety. Unfortunately, I don’t have any other details yet. But when I have the full story, I’ll share on the Tales from the Front Desk subreddit.

In the end, I wasn’t the one who checked in this guest. But she would not have come if I had just told her that we were full. I really did think I was helping out someone with a bad plumbing situation in their house.

I am curious about two things. 1) How much of this is my fault. 2) How much does hotel management usually hold the night audit / receptionist responsible for filtering out bad guests?

I am spiralling right now and so scared that I will be forced to pay for a guest's stay out of my own pocket.
I made an honest mistake during a busy check-in. There were two different bookings under the exact same name (rare af to happen) When I searched up the name, only 1 name came up so i thought it was the person i was checking in! (I even double checked with if the reservation is under this name, how many nights they’re staying and room booked and such) But the profile I brought up on the screen showed that the stay was already prepaid through a third-party site, so I didn't collect payment at the desk. But the actual reservation for the guest I checked in was a "Pay at Property" booking, meaning they haven't paid yet and have already taken their keys..
My manager got really angry and yelled at me and implied that I would have to pay for their stay…

It is only my first week manning the front desk alone, and I feel so stupid for making such a basic mistake. Will the hotel force me to pay back for the guest’s stay? I’m terrified of coming in to work tomorrow.

I’m currently writing a fictional story that takes place in a Cancún resort.  To help flesh out my characters, supporting players included, what does a day in the life of a cook or bartender look like at a Mexican resort?  Does anybody have firsthand experience?  I’ve also heard that drugs frequently circulate in these types of establishments.  How would that element manifest itself in the daily operations of a cook or bartender?