Introduction

The structure of the book

This is the second edition of a book intended for students studying front office operations at all levels from school-leaver up to degree and post-graduate. Although this is a wide range of qualifications, the operations themselves remain the same whatever the academic level of the recruit. Our aim has been to describe these in a clear and user-friendly fashion, without undue simplification or unnecessary complication.

As we said in the Introduction to the first edition, one important difference between this book and the more traditional front office texts is that it tries to reflect all the different aspects of the receptionist's job. This can be divided into three elements, namely the clerical, the hospitality or customer care aspect, and selling. Moreover, we think that you ought to know something about the management aspects too.

In our first edition, we combined ‘hospitality’ and ‘selling’ on the grounds that both involved social skills. Nowadays, however, competition is so keen that we think ‘selling’ deserves a section to itself. Our second edition is therefore divided into four parts.

Part 1

This looks at the process of dealing with enquiries and reservations, room allocations, bills and check-outs. These are clerical functions, calling for a methodical approach with a strong emphasis on accuracy and tidiness. They require a knowledge of procedures, which make up a very large part of the content of the traditional front office textbook. They are undeniably important, but they are also usually straightforward. We have tried to cover them as simply and clearly as possible in order to leave room for what we consider to be even more important aspects.

Part 2

Front office staff deal with people, either over the telephone or on a face-to-face basis. This calls for an entirely different set of abilities, notably tact, diplomacy and the capacity to project hospitality. This is a social skill, which is much more difficult to teach. It is all very well exhorting receptionists to be ‘polite’, ‘helpful’ and so on, but there is no evidence that this has much effect in practice. What is needed is an approach that will actually change the would-be receptionist's behaviour.

This requires both a conceptual structure and some effective practice material. We have tried to provide both, in the first case drawing largely on the ‘behavioural’ approach, and in the second by devising a set of role-playing problems which can be rehearsed (the choice of term is deliberate) over and over again. These formed a part of the first edition of this book, and we have taken the opportunity to expand them here.

Part 3

The third important skill is selling. Hotels are almost always profit-making concerns, and it is the rooms which provide most of the profits. Front office staff who are not sales-orientated are not likely to be much use. This explains why we have devoted a section to the various ways in which staff can improve the ‘yield’. Selling is another social skill, of course, but it is not necessarily the same as providing hospitality, though a satisfied guest is one of the best advertisements that a hotel can have.

Part 4

Finally, we have tried to cover a number of management aspects. This doesn't mean we believe that every reader has to be an aspiring front office manager, though there is no reason why a bright and hard-working receptionist shouldn't climb to the top of the ladder, as indeed many have done in the past. Even if you are not as ambitious as that, however, the days of Think? You're not paid to think, you're paid to do as you're told!’ are long over, and receptionists ought to know not only what they are doing, but why.

It is important to be clear about what we mean by this management dimension. We are not trying to produce a book about management for front office managers, but rather to expand the scope of the traditional front office textbook to cover a number of topics that are usually excluded. For example, there are a number of topics (such as the activities of Tourist Information Centres) which fall halfway between marketing and front office operations, and which affect the work of the latter. Our view is that receptionists ought to know something about them. In the same way, we think that receptionists ought to know something about how a hotel goes about setting prices for its accommodation, establishing criteria for the purchase of new equipment, and a variety of other ‘management’ considerations.

Some points about style and content

We have addressed our material to ‘you’ because this seems the simplest and most direct way of doing it. The ‘you’ we have in mind is a student who knows relatively little about front office operations at the outset, but who wants (or at least needs) to learn more.

We have chosen to call the receptionist ‘she’ and the guest ‘he’. This choice is a matter of expediency, based on the fact that we don't want to use the clumsy construction ‘he or she’ every time we describe what a receptionist does. It does NOT reflect any unconscious sexist bias on our part, and you shouldn't allow it to affect your perceptions either. It is true that in the past most receptionists have been female and the majority of guests male, but there is no reason why this should continue to be the case. We expect to see many more female front office managers in the future, and have tried to emphasize this by using ‘she’ for the manager as well. In the same way, we expect to see many more female ‘FITs’ (Frequent Independent Travellers) as guests in the future. If on occasion we have mentioned the special problems of the single woman guest, this is simply because such problems exist and there is no point in ignoring them.

We should perhaps also apologize for referring to one or two unsavoury operational problems, such as theft and vice. This last problem is generally omitted from standard front office textbooks, but we think it needs to be covered. This does not reflect any preoccupation on our part with the twilight world of pimps and call girls, but rather a recognition that they represent a problem that it is dangerous to ignore. We do not want to suggest that hotels are unusually immoral, but it should be obvious that single travellers finding themselves at a loose end in the evenings and at the same time free from all the constraints of their home environment sometimes succumb to temptation. And where there is a demand, there will always be people prepared to cater for it. It is important to realize that a hotel runs very considerable risks if it caters for this particular kind of demand. Any would-be receptionist ought to know what the risks are and how to avoid them.

Another point we need to explain is our attitude to computerization. As we noted in the Introduction to our first edition, computerized reservation systems spread rapidly during the 1980s. They have gone on doing so, and a high proportion of British hotels now use them. Nevertheless, others continue to use the older manual (i.e. paper-based) systems, and we feel it is still necessary for you to know something about these for the following reasons:

Many hotels still use them. In fact, there can be good reasons for preferring a manual system, especially in smaller hotels, so they are likely to go on doing so.

Manual systems form the basis of most of the computerized routines. It is easier to understand what a computer's screen is showing you if you have followed the same procedure through on paper first.

Understanding the limitations of the manual systems helps you to appreciate the advantages of the computerized ones.

Computers are still liable to crash or ‘go down’. It makes sense to have a manual system ready to go as a back-up system. Front office staff need to know how to operate such a system. This means you.

For these reasons, we propose to do as we did in the first edition and discuss the manual procedures before going on to consider their computer-based alternatives, though we shall try to do so as briefly as possible. More importantly, we will try to bring out the strengths and weaknesses of each, so that you can arrive at a balanced and informed judgement.

As far as the computer systems themselves are concerned, we will be trying to provide an overview rather than describe any one system in particular. This is still a rapidly evolving field, and both the hardware and the software currently available are constantly being improved and extended. Each major hotel group has its own system, and it would be foolish to restrict ourselves to just one.

In fact, we have tried to avoid mentioning proprietary names throughout, except where (as in the case of Whitney) they have become ‘industry standard’. Our sample forms are generalized models rather than examples taken from specific hotels. Each hotel's system has its own peculiarities, and we have tried to concentrate on the common factors. You will find that one of the standard end-of-chapter assignments invites you to collect a representative sample of such forms and to compare these with the models shown in the text.

A final word for those of you who don't like maths very much. Unfortunately, the nature of business means that numbers are its lifeblood. Hotels exist by letting rooms, and occupancy percentages are thus a key measure of their success. Rooms also have to be let at a profit, so revenue and cost figures constitute another set of key measures. In other words, you have to be able to handle the basic figures.

Fortunately, these are relatively straightforward, and we will not be asking you to follow anything very complicated. We may invite you to do the occasional sum or work out a percentage or two, but there will be nothing that you can't deal with using an ordinary hand calculator.

The one thing we would suggest above and beyond this is to familiarize yourself with computer spreadsheets. These can be very useful, especially in dealing with ‘what if?’ problems like overbooking (‘What if we did overbook and everybody came...?’). Many students are reluctant to create their own spreadsheets because they are afraid they won't be able to construct the necessary formulae. In fact these are usually quite simple, and we have detailed them where we think that a problem will respond to a spreadsheet-based approach.

What is front office?

‘Front office’ is a term used in hotels to cover the various sections which deal with reservations, room allocation, reception, billing and payments. Front office is only one of the departments within a hotel, as is obvious from the generalized (but typical) organization chart shown in Figure 1.

The first contact most would-be guests have with a hotel is with its telephone switchboard, which is part of front office. The telephonist puts the guest through to someone in the reservations department, who takes his booking and deals with any subsequent correspondence such as confirmations, amendments or cancellations.

Figure 1 Hotel organization chart

When the guest arrives he may be assisted by a uniformed porter, though this is not always the case nowadays. What is certain is that he will have to go to the reception desk to register and obtain his room key.

During his stay he may well have occasion to go back to reception several times, sometimes for information or to pick up messages, and sometimes for help with tickets or further travel. He will probably have to call there at the end of his stay in order to hand in his room key and deal with his bill.

This does not end his connection with the hotel. His registration form must be kept for a specified period, and the information it contains can be used for a variety of follow-up communications designed to get him to come back at some time.

All these vitally important contacts are the job of ‘front office’, an American term used in place of the older word ‘reception’. Strictly speaking, it only covers those staff who come into direct, face-to-face contact with the guests, the other associated sections being known as ‘back office’. However, the term ‘front office’ is now generally used to describe the whole range of ‘front of house’ sections, namely:

uniformed staff

switchboard

reservations

reception

enquiries

bill office

cashier

guest relations

We will use the term in this way, reserving ‘reception’ and ‘receptionist’ to describe the desk and the staff who work behind it.

Hotels and other providers of accommodation

Although we are mainly concerned with hotels, you should not forget that there are many other forms of accommodation letting, most of which face many of the same problems and require much the same kind of skills. Examples include:

1 Ships. Cruise liners are really ‘floating resort hotels’. Passengers have to be allocated cabins, and may send or receive messages from the outside world. There are often foreign exchange and immigration formalities to be handled. Passenger ferries have their guests aboard for a shorter period, but they too must provide cabins, meals, drinks and a variety of services.

2 Boats. These can range from the chartered luxury yacht in the Mediterranean or Caribbean through to the canal-based narrow-boat or Broads cabin cruiser. Here the accommodation available is self-catering, mobile and thus not under the immediate control of its owner, but the booking process still has to be completed, and the boats have to be cleaned and maintained between trips.

3 Holiday camps. This is another form of holiday letting. The traditional camp accommodated its customers in chalets and fed them in large restaurants. Nowadays many of the chalets are self-catering, but the accommodation side of the operation remains very much the same.

4 Camp sites. Although in this case the guests may provide their own accommodation (tents or caravans), there are still bookings to handle and various facilities and services to be provided and maintained (water, power, toilets and shops, for example).

5 Timeshare complexes. Here the residents are also part-owners who have bought the right to use a particular unit for one specific week or fortnight every year. The units are usually self-catering, but most timeshare complexes include resort hotels facilities such as restaurants and swimming pools. Their offices have to keep track of the various lettings, and oversee the cleaning of the apartments between visitors.

6 Student halls of residence. In the past, these resembled residential hotels with a restricted type of clientele. Nowadays many of them are used to accommodate short course or conference delegates during the academic holidays, and have moved correspondingly closer to the normal commercially motivated hotel in that short-term lettings have to be arranged and bills made out and presented.

7 Hospitals. Once again, the tendency has been for hospitals and hotels to move closer together. Not only have hospitals themselves tended to become more relaxed in terms of open access (the rigid, rule-fixated ward sister is thankfully a thing of the past) but hotels are increasingly catering for their guests’ health. There have always been spa hotels and sanatoriums catering for guests who wanted to take ‘the cure’ in comfort, but swimming pools and health club facilities are extending the concept into everyday life. At the same time, hospitals are beginning to think in terms of profitability (or at least effective cost control), or are setting up ‘hotel services’ departments for other reasons.

To sum up, any establishment providing food, drink and accommodation for a fluctuating group of residents is faced with similar problems to those of a hotel's front office. Their accommodation booking processes may differ in terms of organization and terminology, but their basic function remains the same, namely to make sure that every valid reservation is honoured, and that nobody is unwittingly double booked.

There are other institutions which display certain similarities to hotels, such as residential homes. However, their inmates are permanent residents. There is always some turnover among them, of course, but it is more like that found in a block of residential apartments, and is somewhat outside the scope of this book.

There is one last type of establishment whose operations are very similar to those of a hotel, but whose atmosphere is so different that it also falls outside the scope of this work. We refer to penal institutions such as prisons, detention centres and the like. Here there is a constantly shifting population of ‘guests’ (i.e. inmates). They have to be allocated to rooms (cells) as well as being fed, exercised and given something to do during the day (consider the parallel with a holiday hotel). Their belongings have to be looked after during their stay (involving safe keeping for valuables) and they must be given certain (admittedly limited) opportunities to communicate with the outside world.

The parallels are obvious, yet nobody ever confuses the two types of establishment. This brings us back to one of our main themes, namely that an essential ingredient of the hotel ‘package’ is hospitality. Prison staff are expected to treat their charges correctly and in accordance with the rules, but they are not expected to try to make them feel ‘at home’. Hotels, cruise ships, timeshares, halls of residence and modern hospitals DO try to make those who stay in them feel at home, and therein lies a fundamental difference.

Types of hotel

These vary according to four main factors:

1 Location. This tends to determine the type of clientele. A hotel on a tiny tropical island with limited communication facilities will have plenty of holiday guests, but it will attract relatively few business travellers. The main types of location are as follows:

– city centre

– suburban

– airport

– main road (motel)

– resort

– country

2 Size. This is related to the amount of business likely to be generated by the hotel's location and the presence or absence of competition. Other things being equal, city centre establishments will be larger than country hotels, because more people are likely to be drawn to the city. As far as Britain is concerned, the main categories are:

– fewer than 25 bedrooms:	small
– 25-99 bedrooms:	medium
– more than 100 bedrooms:	large
– more than 300 bedrooms:	major

The proportion of small to large hotels has been decreasing. This is due partly to the general decline of the traditional seaside resorts resulting from the expansion of package tour holidays. However, there are still far more small hotels than large ones.

3 Length of stay. This is influenced by the hotel's location and type of clientele. Those catering for transient customers (motels and airport hotels) will seldom have average stays longer than one night, whereas a resort hotel may attract holidaymakers who stay for a week or more. However, this latter type of business has declined with the spread of car ownership, since more and more people now prefer to spend their holidays touring, which means that they stay for shorter periods in any one location.

4 Grade. Hotels vary considerably in terms of price. It is possible to pay as little as £20 or as much as £200 per night in hotels only a mile or two apart. The differences are due to:

– location (desirable sites are expensive to build on)

– the extent and quality of the facilities

– service standards: here the ratio of staff to rooms is crucial (luxury hotels may have up to three employees per room).

Hotel classification schemes

There are a number of schemes in existence in Britain. The Automobile Association (AA), the English Tourist Board (ETB) and the Royal Automobile Club (RAC) have now agreed to harmonize their criteria for classification. This implies the phasing out of the ETB's ‘Crown’ system. The new common system is typical of most schemes, which award an ascending number of stars on the basis of the facilities the hotel offers, as follows:

	Hotels and inns generally of small scale with good facilities and furnishings; adequate bath and lavatory arrangements. Meals are provided for residents, but their availability to nonresidents may be limited.
	Hotels offering a higher standard of accommodation (e.g. with TVs and telephones in the rooms); all bedrooms containing a private bathroom or shower with lavatory.
	Well-appointed hotels with more spacious accommodation, with all bedrooms containing a private bathroom/shower with lavatory. Full reception and fuller meal facilities are provided.
	Exceptionally well-appointed hotels offering a high standard of comfort and service, with all bedrooms providing a private bathroom with bath, shower and lavatory.
	Luxury hotels offering the highest international standards.

Red stars are used to denote hotels of outstanding merit. Quality ratings are used for other establishments (71 per cent plus being ‘very good’, 64-71 per cent being ‘good’ and lower scores still indicating a satisfactory standard for the star rating).

One to five rosettes are added if the food is specially recommended.

Bed and breakfast establishments such as guest houses, small inns and farmhouses are graded on a scale of one to five ‘Q's. A ‘5Q’ establishment is outstanding in terms of comfort, quality and atmosphere, and has a high proportion of en suite facilities.

Membership of these schemes is still optional rather than obligatory because Britain has not yet gone as far as many European countries, which have compulsory hotel grading and classification schemes. However, classification is carried out by impartial inspectors.

Different hotels require different systems

One of the most important things to remember about front office procedures is that no one system is ideal for all circumstances. As we have seen, hotels vary very much in size, grade and type of customer, and what suits one type of establishment may not suit another.

To make this point clearer, we invite you to look at two imaginary hotels which we think typify the range of establishments you might find in operation. We shall be using these as the basis for various assignments. There are, of course, many other types of hotel, ranging from seaside boarding houses through small country inns and private residential establishments up to the exclusive five-star hotels offering the highest possible standards of luxury and personal service. However, the two we have chosen allow us to look at the kinds of system you are most likely to meet.

One (the Tudor) is typical of many medium-sized provincial hotels in that it dates from the heyday of the British seaside holiday and is consequently now rather elderly. It has been progressively refurbished, but nothing can change the fact that its rooms still differ significantly in terms of their size and the facilities they offer. As we shall see, this affects the way that it runs its booking system. One very important aspect of this is that it would not necessarily have benefited from the introduction of a computer, and since the management has been a little old-fashioned, it has not acquired one yet. This allows us to look at the kind of manual systems still in widespread (and perfectly satisfactory) use.

The other hotel (the Pancontinental) is a very different type of establishment. Since it is located close to an airport and a motorway intersection (both creations of the 1950s and 1960s), you would expect it to be much newer, and so it is. It has the standardized rooms typical of most post-war hotels, which allows it to operate a different kind of booking system. It is also larger and busier, with more facilities and a different kind of clientele. These factors mean that it benefits considerably from computerization, and (since the management has been anything but old-fashioned) it has had a computer since the early 1980s, and indeed has already upgraded its system twice.

We have described these two hotels as fully as possible because we want you to use them in subsequent assignments. Your standpoint should be that of the head receptionist or front office manager, and your job will include staffing and running the front office, trying to maximize occupancy and room revenue, and making decisions about systems and equipment. Although you can't expect to make the final decisions about some of these matters in real life, you may still be asked for your ideas. You should also know your hotel thoroughly, which is why we have provided you with what at first may seem like some irrelevant information.

You may well find that you know a local hotel which shares some of the characteristics of either the Tudor or the Pancontinental, in which case you are perfectly entitled to draw on this for additional detail. Of course, you shouldn't assume that one hotel's system will necessarily fit another's requirements in every particular. However, don't be afraid to borrow someone else's good ideas. If they work, it is the guest who benefits.

The Tudor Hotel

The Tudor Hotel is located in Abergelyn, a small town situated on the Welsh coast between Aberystwyth and Caernarvon. Abergelyn was a small fishing village at the start of the nineteenth century, but it possessed a reasonable beach and with improvements in communication it had developed into a minor tourist resort by the end of the century.

Abergelyn now has a population of 25,000. The fishing industry has virtually disappeared, but the town continues to act as a market centre for the farming population of the Gelyn valley, and there is also a small industrial park with three or four light manufacturing concerns attracted by the relatively low local rates and wages. Local unemployment currently stands at 8.3 per cent, and there is competition for part-time employment.

Figure 2 The Tudor Hotel (courtesy Val Slomka)

There is a plan to build a major new nuclear power station on the nearby Pen-set peninsula. This is being vociferously opposed by some local environmental interests, but there is an equally widespread view that it will bring increased prosperity to the area. The proposal has been the subject of a planning inquiry, but this is due to report in the near future, and it is confidently expected that it will go ahead. The planned power station will be hidden from the town and it is claimed that it will not affect the tourist amenities.

Abergelyn has a sandy beach backed by a promenade. The small, picturesque port has become a thriving sailing centre. At the moment most of the boats are privately owned, but there is increasing interest in day hire and weekend or week-long sailing tuition. The town is also a base for walkers and mountain climbers, and there is a pony-trekking centre a mile or two inland. In addition, there is a light railway up the Gelyn valley to Lake Alwryt which was restored in 1965 and is now a considerable tourist attraction.

The main coast road and railway both pass through the town. The road originally ran along the promenade, but through traffic is now diverted around a new bridge and a ring road which circles the town further inland.

The Tudor Hotel is one of three hotels in the town. The others are The Grand, which is rather larger and more up-market, and The Station, which is smaller and cheaper. There are also a dozen or so guest houses offering bed and breakfast accommodation, mainly during the summer season, and large camp and caravan sites within a quarter of a mile of the town centre. The town has a Tourist Information Centre which operates a local booking service.

The Tudor Hotel is located about two-thirds of the way along the promenade on the town side and about 1 km from the main shopping centre. It is set back from the road itself by an area which was originally a garden but which was converted into a tarmac-surfaced car park in 1964 and holds forty cars. There is plenty of twenty-four-hour parking along the promenade itself (though this tends to become full at peak holiday periods) and a large public car park within 0.5 km.

The hotel itself looks out onto the sea, and the view from the front bedrooms is excellent. It was built in 1904 but has been considerably modified at various times since. Two lifts were installed in 1949 and the original mechanisms replaced in 1974. A coal-fired central heating system was installed in 1951 and converted to natural gas in 1977.

The public rooms consist of a bar, a restaurant (capable of seating eighty-eight covers) and a residents’ lounge used for the service of morning coffee, afternoon teas and after dinner coffees. The hotel holds a restaurant and a residential licence.

A side extension originally designed as a function room-cum-ballroom was modified during the mid-1970s so that it could also provide conference facilities: the main area can still seat sixty covers as a function room but is able to accommodate 100 delegates when used for conference purposes. It has adequate AV equipment (microphone, screen, video and slide projector, etc.) and there are three smaller seminar rooms plus separate cloakroom facilities.

The general style of decoration has been chosen to retain the original atmosphere and appearance of the building, though with some modern concessions such as fitted carpets in the bedrooms, corridors and stairways. The furniture is traditional in style, and though it is mainly reproduction the dining room does contain a magnificent and genuine Welsh dresser and sideboard. The bedrooms are individually decorated in a variety of soft pastel shades, and the public areas contain a good deal of wood panelling and moulded plaster work. Considerable use has been made of old paintings and prints throughout.

All rooms are equipped with bedside tables, lamps, colour television sets, telephones and tea and coffee makers. All now have a washbasin (with overhead strip light and electric razor socket) and shower cubicles as a minimum provision, and a considerable amount of work has been done to add en suite toilet facilities to as many rooms as possible, though this has not been possible in all cases. The current room situation is as follows:

ten singles with shower

ten singles with bath and toilet

ten doubles/twins with shower

fifteen doubles/twins with bath and toilet

five executive doubles/twins with bath, toilet and balcony

Table 1 The Tudor - average monthly occupancies

Ten of the twins interconnect with other twins, or with singles. Some ‘twins’ have double beds. The rooms within each category are comparable in terms of facilities, but vary significantly in terms of views and their proximity to the stairs and lifts. Some guests have complained about the first floor rooms immediately over the bar area on the grounds of noise.

The average monthly occupancies over the past three years were as shown in Table 1 (note that these are ROOM occupancies, though we have added the number of sleepers underneath) .

The hotel caters for a number of different types of business. These are:

1 Business traffic, mainly sales representatives and travelling professionals. Such guests almost invariably occupy single rooms and stay for one or two nights, the actual average being about 1.5 nights.

2 Touring traffic requiring overnight accommodation. These are people travelling through the area for some reason (perhaps on the way to visit friends, or tourists during the summer). They occupy both twins and singles, and their average length of stay is 1.0 night.

3 Resort business. These are people who come to the town to stay (perhaps using the hotel as a base for day trips of various sorts). This business is mainly seasonal, but there are always a certain number who come in the low season, and even one or two longer stay residents. Holidaymakers occupy mainly twins and usually stay for four to seven days, the actual average being 5.5 nights.

4 Croups, divided more or less equally between small conferences and the more traditional type of coach tour. This business is highly seasonal, with a small surge at Christmas time. The conferences might book for two or three days but the tours are almost always overnight stays, so that the average stay is 1.75 nights.

Over the past year, the average number of sleepers per night in each category has been as shown in Table 2.

Weekday (i.e. Monday to Thursday nights) occupancies are significantly higher than weekend (Friday to Sunday) ones. During the winter season (October to March) the ratio is 2:1, mainly because there are fewer business travellers. During the summer season (April to September) the ratio becomes 3:2 because there is a higher proportion of tourists.

Table 2 The Tudor - average number of sleepers per night

The hotel is owned and operated by Tudor Hotels Ltd, a small private company whose main shareholders are Mr and Mrs Evans. Mr David Evans acts as general manager and managing director, Mrs Rebecca Evans as company and general secretary. Mr Evans had been an executive with a major manufacturing company: he bought a controlling interest in the Tudor Hotel by combining his redundancy money with a legacy and borrowing the remainder. The company does not own any other properties. Neither he nor his wife have had any practical hotel experience, but they have been running the Tudor Hotel for fifteen years now. Both are in their fifties.

The staff consist of a restaurant manager, a chef, a housekeeper, a head receptionist and a maintenance engineer, together with their subordinates. The front office is staffed by the head receptionist and two part-time assistants, with Mrs Evans providing cover if necessary.

The current profit and loss account and balance sheet are as shown in Figures 3 and 4.

Figure 3 The Tudor Hotel - profit and loss account

Figure 4 The Tudor Hotel - balance sheet

The Pancontinental Hotel

The Pancontinental Hotel is located on the outskirts of Melcaster, a major northern city. Greater Melcaster currently has a population of some 2.75 million, and is an important industrial and commercial centre. There is a large new national exhibition hall, and the city has been energetically promoting itself as a national venue for major sporting and other events.

Melcaster also has considerable attractions as a tourist centre. It is surrounded by moorlands, much of which is of considerable natural beauty and scientific interest, and is also well situated for a number of historical sites. The city has begun to develop its potential for industrial archaeology, and has a thriving cultural life.

The city is well served by the transportation network, with both north-south and east-west motorway connections close to hand, and excellent inter-city rail connections with London and other urban centres. In addition, there is a major international airport within eight miles of the city centre.

The Pancontinental is located on the southwestern side of the city, close to the motorway ring road and within two miles of the airport. Access to the city centre is currently limited to taxis or express coach services, but a light railway link is being constructed as part of the city's new rapid transit system, and is due to commence operations within two years. The region as a whole is still relatively depressed due to the destruction of the old staple manufacturing industries, so that unemployment is currently averaging 10.2 per cent. However, this does not apply to the southwest Greater Melcaster area, which acts as a dormitory suburb for the employees of the region's commercial services and is relatively affluent. The area also has a number of flourishing industries such as computers and light engineering, so that local unemployment is only a third of the regional rate, and local hotels and restaurants have some difficulty in attracting and retaining staff.

The airport itself falls within the city boundaries, but the Pancontinental has been carefully situated just outside these, which gives it the advantage of considerably lower local rates.

There are two other airport hotels of equivalent standard to the Pancontinental, and five more in, or close to, the city centre. All these major competing hotels are owned by national or international groups. In addition, there are a considerable number of smaller two- and three-star establishments scattered throughout the southern Greater Melcaster area, and a larger number of bed and breakfast establishments. There are two local universities, both of which offer conference facilities at their halls of residence during the academic breaks. The city has a Tourist Information Centre operating both local and national booking services. There is also a local hotel association.

The Pancontinental stands in its own grounds, which are extensive enough to allow it to double its size should this prove advisable at some future date. At the moment much of the area is devoted to car parking space, but the remainder has been landscaped with grass, bushes and small trees. The parking areas will hold 450 cars. They are open to the weather, but there is an extensive covered porch which allows for loading and unloading. Goods are delivered at the back of the hotel out of sight of the main entrance.

The hotel was completed in 1980. The front entrance on the ground floor leads directly into the front hall and thence to a lobby running the length of the building. This is lined with a number of shops which are leased by the hotel to various operators (there is a florist, for instance, two boutiques, a souvenir shop and a newsstand and bookstall). The lobby also gives access to the hotel's cocktail bar, a la carte restaurant, coffee shop-cum-buffet, discotheque, indoor swimming pool and health club.

The first floor is largely given over to conference facilities. There is one large conference area capable of accommodating up to 240 persons, four smaller seminar rooms each capable of holding fifty to sixty persons, and a dedicated lobby (used for conference registrations, morning coffees, buffet lunches, teas, etc.) with separate cloakroom facilities. The main conference hall can also be used for banqueting and has a sprung floor suitable for dancing. The remainder of the first floor is used for the hotel's own administrative offices.

Figure 5 The Pancontinental Hotel (courtesy Val Slomka)

There are two pairs of high-speed guest lifts which run from the ground floor to the top of the building, where there is a roof terrace garden which has proved attractive to those who like to watch aircraft landing and taking off: this area is normally glassed in for most of the year but can be left open during summer. It has its own bar and food service facilities.

The hotel is air conditioned and centrally heated throughout. Heating is based on a modern gas-fired system. All public and private rooms are fully double-glazed, and aircraft noise is only noticeable outside.

The hotel's bedrooms are standardized. There are two classes - the double/double or ‘DD’ (equipped with two large beds) and the ‘King’ (a similar-sized room equipped with one large bed). Both types are capable of being used for both single or double occupancy. All rooms open directly onto the corridors, but there are also interconnecting doors which are normally kept locked.

The rooms are well lit and comfortable. All have en suite bathroom with bath and shower facilities, a washbasin with overhead strip light and razor socket and toilet. They are equipped with colour television, mini bar, telephone with direct dial facilities, electric heated trouser press and tea and coffee making facilities. All have built-in clothes hanging space, a dressing table with drawers and mirror, two chairs and a small table. The King rooms also have a two-seater settee. The furnishings are fitted with laminated surfaces and are functional but standardized, and the colour scheme used for bedspreads, curtains and upholstery does not vary from room to room.

The arrangement of rooms is as shown in Table 3.

Table 3 Arrangement of rooms

Floor	Arrangement
Sixth	30 Kings, 20 DDs
Fifth	30 Kings, 20 DDs
Fourth	30 Kings, 20 DDs
Third	30 Kings, 20 DDs
Second	30 Kings, 20 DDs

Over the past year, the average number of occupied rooms per night in each category have been as shown in Table 4.

As in the Tudor, weekday (i.e. Monday to Thursday night) occupancies are greater than weekend (Friday to Sunday) ones, though the difference is not as great. The ratio throughout the year is approximately 4:3.

The hotel caters for a number of different types of business. These are:

1 Airline business. The hotel is used by a number of major airlines for putting up flight crews and staff during regular overnight stopovers. This business can be largely scheduled in advance and contracts are awarded annually. There are also a considerable number of travelling airline executives, in addition to frequent but unpredictable calls to put up groups of passengers delayed by unforeseen events. This category's average length of stay is 1.0 night.

2 Business traffic. This is mainly company executives and travelling professionals of various kinds. The hotel uses the term ‘FITs’ (Frequent Independent Travellers) to describe this important source of business. Most of these guests occupy Kings and generally stay for one night, though since a number remain for two or three nights their average length of stay is 1.3 nights.

3 Transit traffic. These are people who are departing or arriving and who need overnight accommodation. They include both single and double occupancies, and their usual length of stay is one night. A small but significant number require rooms for shorter periods, giving rise to the possibility of two or more lettings within a twenty-four-hour period: for this reason this category's average length of stay is actually 0.95 days.

4 Touring business. As with the Tudor, these are people who come to the region to stay. The hotel provides a useful base from which to explore both the city and the surrounding countryside. This business is noticeably seasonal, though there are always a certain number who come in the low season. Such guests provide both single and double occupancies. Their average length of stay is 2.0 nights.

5 Groups. These are about two-thirds conferences and one-third inclusive tours. The conference element is reasonably well spread throughout the year, while the tour business is more seasonal. Conference delegates average 2.5 nights’ stay, while the tours are almost all overnight stays.

Table 4 The Pancontinental - average monthly occupancies

Over the past year, the average number of sleepers per night in each category have been as shown in Table 5.

The Pancontinental is owned and operated by Paragon Hotels pic, a medium-sized group which also owns sixteen other properties, mostly centred in the north of England. Paragon are themselves a subsidiary of Anglo-Welsh Breweries pic, a major company with important interests in the food and drink industry. Paragon's head office in Birmingham has marketing, human resource management and finance departments, as well as a group reservations office.

The Pancontinental's general manager has to submit annual budget proposals, and is required to meet agreed cost and revenue targets. However, the company policy is to allow the individual hotel managers as much freedom as possible provided that they comply with general policy directives, and the hotel's own management team has a good deal of discretion with regard to operational matters such as staffing levels and rates of pay, booking policies and even room rates.

The current general manager is Thomas Mason, a graduate who entered the hotel industry some twenty-five years ago and has since worked his way up. He is now in his late forties. His management team consists of a deputy manager, a food and beverage manager (whose subordinates include a banqueting manager, head chef and restaurant manager), an accountant, a sales manager and a rooms division manager (whose subordinates include the reception manager, head housekeeper and maintenance manager). The front office is usually staffed by a senior receptionist and two receptionists. Since the hotel is busy twenty-four hours a day, the desk has to be staffed throughout the night as well as during the daytime.

The Pancontinental's current profit and loss account and apportioned share of the group's balance sheet are shown in Figures 6 and 7.

Table 5 The Pancontinental - average number of sleepers per night

Figure 6 The Pancontinental Hotel - profit and loss account

Figure 7 The Pancontinental Hotel - balance sheet