The Reservations Manager leads the day-to-day operations and performance of the Reservations Department, ensuring exceptional luxury service while maximizing room revenue through effective selling, upselling, conversion, and execution of commercial strategies.
Working closely with the Director of Commercial Strategy and other hotel departments, this role ensures a seamless guest journey from the initial inquiry through arrival.
The successful candidate will be a commercially minded hospitality leader with a passion for luxury service, strong coaching and leadership skills, and the ability to translate commercial strategy into effective frontline execution.
Leadership & Team Development
- Lead, coach, mentor, and develop the Reservations team to achieve exceptional service and commercial performance.
- Establish clear performance expectations and foster a culture of accountability, collaboration, continuous learning, and service excellence.
- Conduct regular coaching, one-on-one meetings, performance reviews, and development discussions.
- Support recruitment, onboarding, retention, and development of high-performing team members.
- Lead regular departmental briefings and ensure the team is informed of relevant hotel, market, revenue, guest, and operational updates.
Reservations Operations & Guest Experience
- Oversee the daily operations of the Reservations Department, ensuring all calls, emails, and reservations are handled promptly, accurately, courteously, and efficiently.
- Maintain strong working knowledge of Opera Cloud, SynXis, Revinate Reservations/Sales system, and other relevant systems.
- Ensure accurate handling of reservations, modifications, cancellations, waitlists, deposits, payment requirements, special requests, and inventory-related situations.
- Ensure the accurate capture and communication of guest preferences, special occasions, VIP details, and special requests.
- Work closely with Front Office, Concierge, Spa, ONE Restaurant, Sales, and other departments to deliver a seamless guest experience.
- Personally manage escalated reservation concerns and ensure appropriate follow-up and resolution.
- Review guest feedback and reservation quality results to identify opportunities for improvement.
Commercial Performance & Revenue Collaboration
- Maximize room revenue through effective selling, upselling, cross-selling, and conversion strategies.
- Manage and maintain accurate rate loading, rate plans, packages, promotions, and related reservation system updates, ensuring alignment across applicable systems and distribution channels.
- Establish and monitor key departmental performance indicators, including conversion, average booking value, upsell revenue, upgrades, package attachment, response times, and call quality.
- Task – Rate loading and commission review
- Analyze performance trends and implement action plans to improve results.
- Ensure the Reservations team understands and effectively executes current rates, restrictions, promotions, packages, and inventory strategies.
- Develop upselling and ancillary revenue opportunities in collaboration with the Director of Revenue.
- Provide insight into booking trends, guest objections, cancellations, lost business, and demand patterns.
- Partner with Sales and Marketing on campaigns, promotions, packages, and other commercial initiatives.
Training, Quality & Continuous Improvement
- Develop and maintain structured onboarding and ongoing training programs covering Forbes service standards, luxury selling, upselling, conversion, systems, hotel knowledge, communication, and guest recovery.
- Conduct regular call and email audits and provide documented coaching and feedback.
- Identify opportunities to improve reservation processes, technology, automation, and the overall booking journey.
- Ensure compliance with hotel policies, procedures, and applicable reservation and payment requirements.
- Assist with scheduling, productivity monitoring, budgeting, expense management, and departmental reporting.
- Maintain a thorough knowledge of the hotel's emergency procedures and ensure the team is trained to execute them effectively.
- Perform any other duties and responsibilities as assigned.
Salary range: $65k to 75k
Qualification:
- Minimum 3 years of hotel Reservations experience, including at least 1 year in a supervisory or leadership capacity.
- Previous luxury hotel experience is strongly preferred.
- Strong knowledge of hotel reservations operations, rate plans, packages, selling techniques, and reservation procedures.
- Experience with PMS, and SynXis; Opera Cloud and SynXis experience is an asset.
- Strong understanding of upselling, conversion, guest service, and revenue optimization.
- Strong leadership, coaching, communication, organizational, and problem-solving skills.
- Experience managing team KPIs and performance is strongly preferred.
- Advanced Microsoft Office skills, including Excel, Word, and PowerPoint.
- Resourceful, curious, and committed to continuous improvement.
- Passion for luxury hospitality and exceptional guest experiences.
- Ability to maintain confidentiality of proprietary information.
- While infrequent, flexibility to work non-traditional hours or days when required by a critical business need.
Our people are what make us different. At The Hazelton Hotel, we are committed to workplace diversity and inclusion within our organization, therefore, we encourage all qualified persons from all backgrounds to apply. Accommodations are available, upon request, to all applicants with disabilities throughout our hiring process.
