【文章內(nèi)容簡介】
e balance with the guest , posting any late charges, and accepting payment by credit card or cash or billing the account directly if prior arrangements have been made .Where the frontdesk puter is interffaced to other systems, such as restaurant and bar pointofsales (POS)terminals and a housekeepingdepartment terminal, frontoffice clerical routines are further simplified . When guests settle a dinner or bar check by charging it to their room number, the cashie in the food or beverage (Famp。B) outlet posts this entry on their POS, and that posting is automatically entered on the guest’s bill at the frontoffice terminal . Manual posting is required for any charges that are not automatically handled by the system, such as a guest paid out .Where Famp。B is not interfaced,the Famp。B charges are posted manually at the front office. In much the same way , when housekeeping is interfaced , at the time the guest checks out the room shows up as vacant and ready to make up on the housekeeping housekeeping is not interfaced, list of “on change”and “readytorent” rooms are usually municated back and forth by phone. More and more properties interface their front office not only with other departments but also with their chain or franchise group’s central reservation system ically from the individual is an important timesaver for frontoffice staff and helps maximize the usefulness of the CRS to the individual property .The PMS can also be used to automate and intergrate a number of other functions in the hotel. Traditionally the hotel industry has looked at occupancy as a measure of success . Another indicator of operational success that we have always consulted is the average rate per rented room (the average daily , or ADR).Yield management puts these two together and ,using forecasting based on the history of past sales, sets out to get the best bination of occupancy and ADR .Yield management,then,involves varying room rates according to the demand for rooms in any given time argument is that when the hotel is going to be full, it makes no sense to sell any rooms at special discount rates. On the other hand , on a night when the hotel is definitely not going to fill,selling a room at a discounted price is better than not selling it at all. Going beyond maximizing rate,Holiday Inns are using yield management to take more multiple night (instead of single night )reservations during busy periods on the theory that a multiple night reservation offers less proportionate risk of avacant room following check out. In practice, there are many situations between a fulll house and very low occupancy that need decisions about addition , there is the decesion to overbook ,that is,to take more reservations than there are rooms available based omaa “noshow”factor that can be built into the yield management system on a seasonal and daily basis. While the staff at some properties operates its own yield management system, increasingly panies use puter programs specially designed to take account of a property’ history of demand for rooms and of forecast demand and adjust rares as demand shifts from period to period . Increasingly central reservations systems ate building yield management capabilities into their programs. Yield management does pose management problems. The first is the potential for guest fusionand resentmentwhen fronted with different rates for the same services , depending on when a reservation is customers are accustomed to variable rates on airfares, they may resent them with airline industry prises a small number of major petitors,and customers seldom have much ,on the other hand,have numerous problem is employee management systems take the guesswork out of how many rooms to sell at which price but they also take some of the judgment responsibilities out of reservationists’ and front desk workers’jobs . If a yield management system is not structured to allow workers some latitude to use their judgement , the people who have to use