Front Office, 2nd Edition

Chapter 1

Advance bookings

Introduction

We will begin our study of the work of front office with a look at its clerical functions. The first of these is dealing with advance bookings.

This is only the first part of a continuous process that runs through check-in (arrival and registration) to the guest's stay in-house and finally check-out (departure). It includes the preparation of the guest's bill and the process of settlement. We shall look at these aspects in the following chapters.

Hotels use a range of methods to deal with advance bookings. Manual systems require the completion of a number of different bits of paper, whereas computerized ones rely on a smaller number of keyboard entries. We shall describe the manual systems first, then ...