No hotel operations guide would be complete without examining the role of the housekeeping department. Essentially, this department is responsible for ensuring guests are presented with a clean, hygienic, safe, and pleasant environment, including their rooms and the various shared spaces within the hotel.

Some of the main hotel operations that the housekeeping team is responsible for include cleaning and preparing rooms between guests’ stays, cleaning rooms during guests’ stays, changing sheets and towels, and ensuring common areas are clean. The importance of housekeeping staff increased further during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In general, housekeeping teams work closely with hotel management and the front office department to ensure all their work is carried out on time. Housekeeping employees are also typically responsible for washing bed sheets and towels, tidying common areas to avoid clutter, and maintaining public bathrooms.

The front office department is the most visible department within a hotel, as far as guests are concerned, and is generally situated around the lobby or foyer area. The front office staff is responsible for guest services, which can take many forms, from helping guests check in on arrival and assisting them with checking out again to coordinating various efforts around the hotel to ensure their stay is pleasant.

In addition, the front office is responsible for settling guest accounts, and maintaining records on hotel guests, including the duration of their stay and any preferences they have outlined.

A significant part of the role of the front office is to ensure that various employees and departments providing customer service know what to do and when to do it. It is also important to understand that the front office is the first and primary point of contact for guests who have questions or require assistance during their stay.

The maintenance department is responsible for hotel operations related to repairs within the hotel. This can include maintenance work within various areas, such as heating, ventilation, and plumbing. It may also include repairing and making fixes to the structure of the hotel building itself.

Essentially, the maintenance department is tasked with ensuring that everything within the hotel functions as it should. It is important to understand that much of the maintenance department’s work is preventative maintenance to avoid situations where systems, amenities, or technology break.

In many hotels, the maintenance department functions as its own entity, although some hotels combine the maintenance department with the housekeeping department, which is especially common in smaller properties.

As the name indicates, the food and beverage department is responsible for all hotel operations related to managing and providing food and beverages. It is one of the largest departments in most hotels and can often be the single biggest department regarding the number of people employed to work within it.

Within the broader field of food and beverages, multiple different areas need to be carefully managed, including hotel bars, hotel restaurants, and any room service options that offer food and beverages.

Aside from providing guests staying overnight with food and drinks, this department may also be responsible for hosting or assisting with events within the hotel, such as banquets, business conferences, weddings, and other functions. The food and beverage department contributes significantly to financial outcomes for most hotels.

Food Production is a department which is involved in preparation of food. A process, in which raw materials are cooked, combined and transformed to make a dish. The scope of Food Production has been widening at a faster all over the world.

A Chef is involved from purchasing to deciding the menu, supervising the kitchen, maintaining the quality of food, sanitation standards, and coming up with new dishes. Food Production department comprises of main kitchen, banquet kitchen, soup section, pantry section, pastry section, baking & confectionary section, and vegetable section. Sections may vary based on the scale and star category of a hotel or hospitality establishment.