Maintenance department

Major departments of a hotel

 

General manager

Rooms

Food&Beverage

Human Resources

Accounting

Marketing & Sales

-Reservations  -Food Production         -Employee Recruitment     -Assistant Controllers     -Sales Managers           

-Front Office   -Food Services          -Benefits Manager         -Finance Operations

-Housekeeping -Room Service         -Training                        -Purchasing

-Laundry        -Beverage Manager                                          -Storeroom

-Security        -Convention & Catering                                     -F&B Controller

-Engineering    -Stewarding                                                       -Credit Systems

-PBX

 

Hotel departments can be divided into the front-of-the-house and the back-of-the-house departments. Front-of-the-office departments are those in which employees have extensive guest contact, such as reception, cashiers, concierge, restaurants, room service, bars, recreational areas, etc.

Back-of-the-office departments are those in which the staff has little or no direct contact with guests, such as housekeeping, personnel (human resources), accounting, and the engineering departments.

The first and the last place in which the guest comes into direct contact with the hotel staff is the front desk, it‘s one of the most important departments in a hotel. A hotel’s front office is where guests are greeted when they arrive, where they are registered and assigned to a room, and where they check out. Usually, the telephone operator, other guest communications functions, and the bell staff or those employees responsible for delivering luggage and messages and attending to special guest requests are also included in  the front office department. The reservations department takes and tracks the hotel’s future bookings. It is crucial that the staff in this depatment is well trained, good-mannered, responsible, polite, communicative and active.

 

Housekeeping

The housekeeping staff is one of the busiest in the hotel. This department is responsible for cleaning guest rooms and public spaces, in addition to that it provides valuable information to the front office. Once a room is cleaned, housekeeping must inform the front office so that the room may be sold. A great deal of interdependence exists among the subunits of the rooms department. Certain tasks within the rooms department must occur in a specific order. For example, when a guest checks out, the front office must inform housekeeping so that the room may be cleaned or housekeeping cannot properly provision a guest room if the laundry does not supply enough clean towels or bed sheets. Engineering cannot replace a defective light switch in a guest room if housekeeping does not report the problem. Effective management of this busy department calls for standardized plans, procedures, schedules, and deadlines, as well as direct communication between the executives who manage the rooms department.

Food & Beverage department

The food and beverage (F&B) department offers a variety of facilities to guests but concentrates mainly on the provision of food and drink. These services may be provided by coffee shops, snack bars, and speciality restaurants, and also by the banqueting and room-service departments.Hotel might also have a lounge, a nightclub, and a lobby bar. On a busy day (or night), it is quite likely that functions will be booked in many outlets at the same time. In addition, some outlets may have multiple events scheduled for a single day. There is great diversity in the types of activities performed by a food and beverage department, requiring a significant variety of skills on the part of its workers.Because of that, the food and beverage department is typically split into subunits. The executive chef runs the food production, or kitchen, department. A variety of culinary specialists who are responsible for different aspects of food preparation report to the executive chef.The actual serving of food in a large hotel’s restaurants is usually the responsibility of a separate department, headed by the assistant food and beverage director. The food service department is composed of the individual restaurant and outlet managers, maitre d’s, waiters, waitresses, hostesses, and bus help. Very often, the reputation of the hotel’s kitchen will increase its business. The stewarding department is responsible for cleaning the food and beverage outlets themselves as well as of washing pots and pans, dishes, glasses.

It is only through continuous cooperation and coordination that a hotel’s food service function can be carried out effectively. A guest who is dining in a hotel restaurant requires the joint efforts of the kitchen, food service, beverage, and stewarding departments.

 

Maintenance department.

Maintenance refers to repairs that are made to upkeep of the hotel. This involves painting, plumbing, repairing broken furniture and so on. Nowadays the utility conservation is one the most importnat objectives of the maintenance department. With the cost of energy increasing, the level of the hotel’s water, electricity, and gas consuption must be under control.