Why do hotel front desk staff stare at screens so much?
Ten years ago, over 90 percent of hotels had a front desk where 100 percent of the guests had to check in at these hard to miss physical and sometimes intimidating counters. The receptionists stood on one side of the counter and the Guest or visitor faced them from across the opposite side. Originally it was a high barrier meant to keep guests from crossing into ‘no guest’s land’ - Partially true but entirely not for that reason.
Let’s go back in history… to the turn of the 20th century. Prior to computerization and technological advances, front desk tasks were performed very differently and all of it, manually. At that time, the heart of the front desk was a metal filing system that consisted of rows of pockets to hold rooming and reservations slips. It was called the room rack. Each pocket represented a room (by its number) and more the rooms a hotel had, the more pockets there were.
Much like today’s front desk set-ups, the racks were designed to be mounted and arranged in a 60-degree angle behind the front desk - hidden to guests or visitors who stood in front of the counter. This meant that the number of rooms a hotel had, dictated the height and length of the counter. Bigger the room inventory…larger the front desk counter.
Operationally, try to picture a receptionist of that era. Before him or her, was this large steel framed rack consisting of rows with pockets, each holding cards of various colours. A red card in the pocket showed that the room is occupied, a white card indicates the room is vacant and ready for sale, a blue card signals that the room is held by a guest due to checkout that day, a yellow card would mean that the room is vacant ‘dirty’ (i.e. needs to be cleaned and cleared by housekeeping before it is replaced with a white card) and a brown card for an out-of-order room.
To summarize; this unique colour coded system visually provided information regarding every room in the hotel - if it was occupied, unoccupied, clean, dirty or under repairs. Apart from that, the slips of paper within each pocket provided information such as the name/s of the guest/s, date of arrival & departure, single, double or triple-occupancy, daily room rate, meal plan, source of booking, etc.
Again, place yourself now in the shoes of the receptionist. A guest comes up to the counter, provides his name and wishes to check-in to the room he reserved. From that moment, the receptionist’s eyes focus downwards, solely on the ubiquitous ‘rack’. Firstly, at the day’s ‘reservations’ rack where the guest’s booking is fished out from the neatly arranged reservation slips slotted in alpha order. He then glances at the room rack to pick out the available booked category of room from amongst the white carded pockets.
The search then intensifies when the guest requests for a room on a higher floor or away from the elevators. All the while now, the receptionist’s gaze is not at the guest; instead it is focused entirely downward at the rack…and it would continue to be the same story for every check-in… day in and day out.
The times the receptionists were not handling any check-ins, the story was still no different; the status and condition of the rack had to be constantly checked at any point of time, because updates against checkout and vacancy reports and other necessary corrections had to be made frequently. And so evolved that all familiar behavioural pattern where most receptionists hardly look ‘eye to eye’ at the guest. Not from force of habit…but enforced by the tools at work that required them to constantly lower their field of vision.
But then again, in a world where switching between the work computer, home laptop and smart phone can be more convenient than engaging in a real person-to-person conversation, does it matter so much today? Yes, in the world of hospitality – it does!
Let me tell you more about it the next time.
Shafeek Wahab – Editor, Hospitality Sri Lanka, Consultant, Trainer, Ex-hotelier.
|
|
|
|
