Hotel manager guide

Checking a guest in activates the room phone and puts their name on it; checking out deactivates it and clears the name. Nobody maintains room phones by hand.

Checking a guest in activates the room phone and puts their name on it; checking out deactivates it and clears the name. Nobody maintains room phones by hand, which removes a task and a class of complaint at once: guests who cannot dial out, and charges landing on the wrong room.

What Hotel Manager covers

Those four are the whole of it. A link to a property management system is a separate integration over the FIAS protocol, so if the desk expects room status to appear in the PMS, that is the piece that does it.

Wake-up calls

They can be set at the front desk or by the guest from the room. Test the guest-facing route yourself, because a wake-up call that silently fails is the kind of thing a hotel hears about in a review rather than at the desk.

Housekeeping from the room phone

A cleaner marks a room clean or dirty from the phone in the room, without walking to a terminal or radioing anyone. The codes staff dial are configured for your property, so print them on a card in each room's service area rather than expecting people to remember them.

How rooms are organised

Rooms appear in Hotel Manager grouped by their call restriction group. If you want them listed by floor or by wing, they need a group per floor or wing, and that is a decision worth making before the rooms are entered rather than after.

What a room may dial is controlled by those same restrictions. Tell us what should be blocked, typically international and premium rate numbers.

Test the whole flow before going live

1. Check a room in and confirm the guest name appears on the room phone.
2. Dial an outside number from that room, and then a number that should be blocked.
3. Place an internal call to the front desk.
4. Set a wake-up call from the room itself, not only from the desk.
5. Mark the room clean, then dirty, from the room phone.
6. Check the room out and confirm the name is gone again.

Fifteen minutes that saves a bad opening week.

When something is wrong

Most problems turn out to be the property management system and the phone system disagreeing about a room's state. Note the room number and what the desk shows against what the phone does, and send us both.

See also

• Hotel integration with the FIAS protocol
• Create call groups and pickup groups