Front Desk Manager Description

Qualifications

The employee must have demonstrated a high level of understanding of the Briar Rose's practices and policies, and demonstrated a high level of responsibility and attention to detail. This position is only available to current employees (i.e., with an inside promotion).

Functions

Inventory Management (making sure rooms are appropriately available to reserve)
Verify room holds are being processed and released
Verify room out-of-service conditions are being worked and released. Effectively this means that you should be regularly asking the management, can we have these room nights back for reservations?
Manages inventory for netrate programs (see below)

Revenue Management

Fill newly available room nights with wait-listed persons
Check in newly arrived Netrate reservations on BedAndBreakfast.com so that we get paid

Front Desk Management

confirm guest reservation cards by email and verify cards' information is properly reflected in GT. verify the reservation's dates and pricing (including appropriate charges for extra persons and extra breakfasts). On the text of the email confirm, add detail as to discounts applied so the guest knows they "got their discount", and clean up the guest notes so it makes sense.
verify that the GT reservations two weeks from today have cards and look valid
verify that the GT reservations the day after tomorrow have cards and look valid
verify that the GT reservations tomorrow have cards and look valid. Also, for "Operations" purposes make staff log notes for any special handling that tomorrow's guests will require (sofa sleepers, late arrivals, dietary instructions and so on). When you find a GT reservation that does not have a card: first, check the email confirmation to verify this is an actual reservation; if necessary speak to the General Manager and/or call the guest. If it is an actual reservation, then you may create the card. If necessary, you should also confirm the reservation. It is important to NOT create a card if the reservation is bogus.
monitor how other staff are entering and changing reservations and communicate reminders by email to the staff person when their are discrepancies between our practice and the staff person's practice. If there are systemic discrepancies, the front desk manager should communicate this to the General Manager and she may make a staff log entry to all employees.

Operations

Coordinates guest need fulfillment (special diet shopping & prep, aerobeds, King/Twins, flowers, receiving guest packages, etc.). If the Front Desk Manager is unable to shop for the special needs items, he/she works with the General Manager and other staff to ensure the guest needs are met.

Food Management

On behalf of the group brings the intention to balance the generosity of the food offering against other possible uses of funds, and that we are taking appropriate care when spending money on food.
Monitors and tracks the inventory of all food and supplies that are purchased through grocery stores and UNFI.
Shops at grocery stores for food, supplies, and special needs items, and stores same.
Ensures that foods are being wrapped appropriately and stored at proper temperature. Directs breakfast cooks as to food items to use during breakfast in order to minimize loss through spoilage.
Keeps food storage areas and refrigerators clean, secure, and orderly in order to minimize pest problems. Also, makes Staff Log entries when food appears without labels with guest name, room number, and date.
Places, receives and stores items purchased through UNFI. Orders are received between 8am and 10am on Mondays, and Front Desk Manager is present at the property until the order is processed. He/she verifies items ordered are received, returns incorrect items, and verifies that appropriate corrections are made on the forms for errors, and appropriate refunds are received.
Reports on a monthly basis what the average food & supplies cost is per breakfast.

Hours and Pay

This is a two hour a day job that the employee self-schedules. When working in this job, the employee should focus on this job and only work on other things as an unusual exception (no making of tea, no checking guests in/out, no watching the phone, no socializing, no surfing, etc). It is the front desk manager's responsibility to provide this integrity when requests for help are made by management and staff (in other words, reminding them what job is being performed). The front desk manager should not say "no" to a guest, but instead go find another staff person to address the guest request. The length of the 2 hour shift should almost never be exceeded. If the front desk manager responsibilities are completed for the day, then the employee clocks out of the front desk manager job. There is a $3/hour bonus offered over the employee's normal rate of pay for this job as the job is tedious, clerical and requires an extreme attention to detail. The employee marks this job's hours separately on the back of the time card so a higher rate of pay will be given. Should the person do other Briar Rose work that is not front desk manager work, then the employee should book time at the normal rate of pay.

Current Netrate Strategy

Netrate reservations have a discount that is large. Netrate means bedandbreakfast.com, expedia, sidestep, hotels.com, and kayak.com reservations. We pursue this business with the rationale that (a) it gives us a wider web presence: guests will often see us on these websites and book directly with us (without the discount); (b) we establish a connection with the netrate guest where the guest books directly with us on future stays; (c) we will fill rooms in the low season that we would normally not fill; and (d) we fill roomnights that are "stranded" (ask what this means).

We try to limit the amount of this business due to its high cost (i.e., the large discount). Specifically, we only offer stranded roomnights to netrate in the summer (June through August) or on summer nights that are ten days out or less and show 2 or fewer reservations. In the other months (September - May), we offer Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursday on a "far-out" basis. We define "far-out" as three weeks or more from the present day. However, we never put the Northstar or Shavano rooms into netrate inventory because we cannot rely on knowing which bed configuration the netrate guest wants due to the fact that we have less communication with these guests. We rarely offer Fridays and Saturdays on a far-out basis because we are generally stronger and weekends and want full-paying guests.

In this job, the inventory management of the "far-out" business is simply to adhere to the strategy set above. This takes little time. The exception to this is to remove roomnights on the "far-out" business if it appears that we will have no difficulty selling these nights (due to some special event). Most of the netrate work in this job is to manage the "close-in" inventory. Specifically, what we try to do:

we try to limit netrate reservations breaking up contiguous blocks of availability in a given room. Our full-paying guests frequently want 3 to 5 night stays and they do not want room changes. If we have many one-night netrate bookings, it will tend to limit the amount of such rooms that are available for extended stays in a given room. In this job we make some effort to take inventory out of the netrate channel to preserve the ability to take these extended reservations.
on a close-in basis, we will remove roomnights from the netrate channel if a given night looks strong (high occupancy).
as a given roomnight approaches to the present day within the "close-in" window, we more aggressively put it into netrate. In other words, as the risk increases that the roomnight will not be reserved we decrease the importance of the guidelines that limit the netrate business. For example, this means that if we are only 50% occupied on a night that is three days out or less, we put all the roomnights on that night into netrate (except Shavano and Northstar).