Front Office Operations
The guest cycle and the front desk
The front office executes the guest cycle: pre-arrival, arrival, occupancy, and departure. Each stage has controls the exam probes. Pre-arrival covers reservations, deposits, and pre-registration. Arrival covers check-in, registration, payment authorization, and key issuance. Occupancy covers concierge, messaging, and account maintenance. Departure covers checkout, folio settlement, and post-stay follow-up.
Master the registration and payment mechanics. Authorization holds differ from captures; a hold reduces available credit but is not revenue. Know how to handle walk situations (relocating a guest when the hotel is oversold) and the order of who gets walked - typically lowest-value or last-arriving reservations, never loyalty elites or guests with special needs.
Room assignment logic and room-status accuracy are recurring topics. The front desk relies on housekeeping status updates; selling a dirty room is a service failure traceable to communication breakdown. Understand key control, privacy and data-protection obligations, and the difference between a guest folio and a master account.
Night audit is heavily tested. The audit reconciles the day's transactions, posts room and tax, verifies no-show and late-charge handling, and rolls the business date. Know that no-shows are typically charged one night plus tax per policy and that the room returns to inventory.
Trap: confusing a deposit with a prepayment, or treating an authorization hold as collected revenue. Another trap: assuming checkout automatically releases the hold instantly - card networks may take days.
Rule of thumb: when a guest disputes a charge, verify the folio trail (who posted, when, under what authority) before adjusting; document the resolution.
Worked example: a guest prepaid $300 for three nights but checks out after two. The folio should show the prepayment applied, nights consumed, and any refund or credit per the rate's cancellation terms - not a silent forfeiture.