If you are searching for the opportunity to work in a fast pace environment that operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, there is no better career choice than that of hotel employment. There is never a lack of excitement in the hotel business and there is a variety of hotel employment roles from which to choose, ranging from guest services to maintenance, and from accounting to sales. The great thing about hotel employment is that once you have your foot in the door, the advancement opportunities are almost endless and can allow movement to the top level of management within a hotel or into the corporate world.
The number one role of anyone that finds themselves in hotel employment is that of ‘customer service’. A hotel’s success is built upon guest satisfaction. It is what keeps guests coming back, and return guests are highly valued by any hotel. Whether in accounting or housekeeping the job description for any hotel employment opportunity always revolves around satisfying guest needs.
As a guest service or front desk agent, your number one priority will be to ensure the quick and efficient check-in and checkout of guests, answering any questions, and ensuring guests are fully informed regarding the hotel’s amenities. Whereas in housekeeping, your job description will center around quick and efficient cleaning of a guest’s room or suit. Even if you work in accounting, be sure you’ll find yourself spending a large portion of your day answering guest billing inquiries and concerns. The underlying function of any job within the hotel is guest service. This is why in most hotels the personality of the applicant searching for hotel employment is just as important as their educational background. While it certainly won’t hurt to have a college degree, especially if looking for hotel employment in management, you’ll find that many hotel employees don’t have a particularly extensive educational background, but have entered hotel employment at the ground level and worked their way into upper-level management positions through hard work and great guest service skills. Due to the often younger demographic of hotel employees and the opportunity to move freely between hotels of the same company or brand, the turnover rate in hotel employment is typically high. This means that for someone who wants to succeed within the hotel business, positions are continuously opening, which provides for plenty of advancement opportunities.
Unfortunately, due to the availability of positions and lower educational requirements needed to fill them, hotels generally pay on a lower scale than many other industries. Entry-level positions such as room attendant, front desk agent, even some assistant roles, generally start between $8-13/hr (US). Of course pay rates vary widely depending on the size of the hotel and whether it is located in an urban, suburban or rural environment. Urban and downtown locations will normally pay higher wages since they usually have a higher occupancy and room rates.
Management salaries for hotel employment are a bit more competitive, but often rely on bonuses based upon guest service and operational effectiveness scores to increase salaries by as much as 20-30%. Many hotels also trickle down smaller bonus programs to the line level employees based upon similar guest service scores regarding room cleanliness, speed and efficiency of check-in, and similar factors. The bonuses of hotel employment positions in sales departments are often focused on a percentage of sales as opposed to guest surveys or questionnaires.
The hotel employment opportunities available at any given time can fluctuate greatly based on a number of factors. Certainly the general economic flows of a state or country have an impact, especially on the overall success of a hotel company or brand. However, the hiring practices and opportunities at individual properties depend mostly on location, the success of the local economy, as well as the ownership’s management style if a property is franchised.
A hotel located in a large city with plenty of convention and tourism revenue might not feel the impact of an economic downturn as greatly as one found in a smaller city or town, although due to competition in a larger area and a hotel’s reliance upon tourism, the opposite could be true. Even hotels in the same city can have varying degrees of success in the same economic conditions. A downtown property might have plenty of business, while a suburban location could have their occupancy drop dramatically or vice versa.
The ownership of a hotel can also make a huge impact upon the hiring practices of an individual or group of hotels. Often, corporate owned properties tend to remain a bit more stable during periods of economic hardship, since they have the income flow from a variety of properties, some of which might be doing well, while others hold steady or struggle. With franchised properties though, hiring for hotel employment can change quickly based on the ownerships income needs (especially if the hotel’s revenue must be tapped for other businesses). Since franchises don’t normally have the cash reserves or lines of credit that corporately owned hotels do, they often don’t have the leeway or the ability to wait and see if a property’s occupancy or rates will rebound before they must make tough layoff decisions or enforce a hiring freeze.
If you are interested in hotel employment, there are several great resources at your disposal. Hcareers.com is one of the best ways of finding hotel employment. Hcareers.com is a job website that focuses purely on hospitality-based employment. It is easy to use, doesn’t require membership to search its database, and has searchable positions within the United States, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands.
Often it is just as easy to find hotel employment by utilizing local newspapers and employment guides. There are often hourly positions posted in these resources, but many times management opportunities aren’t listed. If searching for mid and upper-level hotel employment it is best to call the hotel directly through their HR department or job line, or search the company’s website.
If you decide that hotel employment is right for you, be prepared to enter a unique working environment, different from almost any other. A hotel’s continuous operation sometimes makes it seem almost like a home. And similar to a home, a strong bond is often built among the employees and many times guests as well. The career advancement opportunities and broad range of available positions makes hotel employment a great choice for many types of people, personalities, and educational backgrounds.
