Comment: Terence Ronson on phasing out the Front Desk
08 September 2010
The King is dead. Long live the King (French: Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi!) is a traditional proclamation made following the accession of a new monarch in various countries, such as the United Kingdom.
In hotel parlance - I shall interpret this to read: The Front Desk is dead. Long live the [new] Front Desk.
The Front Desk as we knew and once loved it has to go! It's a false barrier between the Hotel [You] and the Guest - it no longer works - and should not be used in Hotels.
When first conceived, the Front Desk was to be exactly that - a Desk where certain guest-facing staff would work from and interact with the guest. In those early days, it was decked out with leather bound ledgers that guests were required to sign-into. They morphed into filing trays containing guest-related correspondence and heavy paper stock registration cards that got time-punched when a guest checked-in. The centerpiece of any significant Hotel Front Desk pre-computerization was a Whitney Rack. This simple yet complex system became the foundation of today's PMS.
Pre-electronic door locks, the Front Desk was the repository for metal keys attached to over-sized fobs. As the years went by, the Front Desk rapidly filled up with all manner of electronic devices to include, but not be limited to: Computer terminals, credit card machines, phones, mice, key encoders, Passport/ID scanners, counterfeit money detectors, tax receipt machines, calculators and folio printers. Look around, and you will easily observe that some Hotels so overfill their Front Desks with equipment that it could easily be mistaken as something out of NASA's Mission Control.
Now with the arrival of mobile and wearable computers, surface technology, soft copy correspondence, omnipresent Wi-Fi, and the desire by many hotels to 'room guests', this place where staff seek refuge behind [and sometimes position themselves as more superior in status than their guests] no longer has a justifiable position in a Hotel Lobby.
