4 Activity.

Student A.

You have spoken to the Receptionist. Now talk to the member of the hotel staff who is available to help you. Explain your needs to him/her.

Student B

You are the member of the hotel staff who can help the guest. Listen to his/her needs. Either (a) offer to help, or (b) explain why you are unable to help at the moment.

5 Activity

You think of any job that is done in a hotel. Pretend you do the job. Ask other students “What’s the job?”

Other students ask yes/no questions about the job. You can only answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’. They must try to guess the job you do in 10 questions or less.

Vocabulary notes

Answerable to	Responsible to
Enhance	Improve
In-house training	Training given in the hotel by hotel staff
Onward travel	Going on from one destination to another
Perspex	A strong type of plastic that can be used instead of glass
Personal touch	Personal service
Respectively	In the same order the things you have just mentioned
Skills	Abilities you need to do a job well

UNIT 4

Reservations and Check-in

• Recording reservations

• Reservation (booking) form

• Procedure of reservation, that hotel staff should follow

1 Reading

Read the text and answer the following questions

Today there are a lot of traditional ways of recording reservations. Of course some hotels use computers nowadays, but one thing is the same for almost all hotels, and that is that when the guest makes a reservation, the details of the reservation are written down on a piece of paper - that's before we enter the information into any other record, and before we key it into a computer, or anything else. The reservation is noted down.

How do we do this? Well in most hotels, you would find a Standard Reservation Form or Card. As soon as a guest makes a reservation, we write the details on the Reservation Form. A Reservation Form is useful in several ways. First of all it acts as a check-list. It helps you to make sure that you get all the necessary information from the person. Secondly, it standardizes the information. It gives the information in the same place and the same order for every guest, and that means we can find the information very quickly when we want it. And thirdly, it reminds us to tell the guest certain things - things he should know, like the rate for the room.

So we've filled in the Reservation Form. Next, we can enter all the reservations into a Reservation Diary under the date when the guests are due to arrive under the date of arrival. And once again, we have an example of a page from a Reservation Diary for you to look at. Of course this is a loose-leaf diary, you can take pages out and put them in as you want. So you have a new page for each day of arrival. Each new page goes at the back of the diary, and each old page is removed from the front, after the guests for that day have arrived. Of course each page may have the names of several arriving guests, as you see in the example remember that these names aren't in alphabetical order. They are written down in the order in which they make their reservation.

The diary is fine for checking for arrivals, but it doesn't tell at a glance which of your rooms are going to be occupied and for how long. It's useful to know the advance occupation of each room, especially in hotels with many different types of room. So we record the advance reservations on a Reservations Chart. It's useful when there are many different types of room because you can see immediately which type of room is available and match each room with the guest's requirements. And of course it's also useful in hotels where guests stay quite a long time, I mean three nights or more. Without a chart you may not easily see when the room will become available. So it is often used in the older, resort type of hotel, where guests often stay for several days and book a long time in advance.

The next type of records is Hotel Register. It records all bookings by date of arrival and shows all arrivals for a particular day at a glance.

Another way of recording reservations is Room Status Board, which shows all rooms by room number and floor, and gives the current and projected status of all rooms on a particular day, with details of occupation.

Guest Index lists all current guests in alphabetical order with their room numbers and provides an additional quick point of reference in larger hotel.

Guest History records all previous visits to a hotel.

Answer the questions:

1. Give two ways in which a reservation form is useful.

2. Where do new pages go into the reservation diary? Front or back?

3. Are names in the diary written in order of booking, or in alphabetical order with room numbers and provides an additional quick point of their reference

4. Why is the reservation chart useful when there are many different types of room?

5. A reservation chart is also useful in hotels where guests

(complete this sentence)