A Complete Guide on How to Become a Hotel Manager.

A Quick Glance at the Prospects & Challenges of the Hotel Industry

Hotel management is one of the most lucrative and promising careers that one can pursue to excel both as a professional and as a social personality. It not only helps one to develop social and practical skills, but also enables one to imbibe the spirit of team work and leadership that are highly sought after and appreciated in any field of management. However, care must be taken when choosing this career path, as not everyone is suited well enough to cope with the persisting challenges associated with it. The following key inherent skills and qualities must be present within an individual or at least should be willingly adopted by the learner when pursuing their career in hotel management:

1. Extroversion: This trait is the most important of all the qualities desired by the hotel industry, as this field of profession requires one to be open about spontaneous communication with customers and stakeholders at every level of the organization.
2. Stress Management: While working in a hotel, an individual is faced with countless stressful situations that often overwhelm them, leading to demotivation and thus, lower productivity and quality of performance. Stress management should therefore be taken as a key capability of someone working or willing to work in a hotel environment.
3. Time Management: In hotels, being able to deliver services on time is always appreciated by the customers. Even a minute late service often infuriates a customer, leading to complaints, negative reviews and words of mouth that end up tarnishing the hotel’s brand image and reputation in the long run. To avoid such circumstances, time management skills should be inherent or adopted and consistently practiced by an individual who is considering or willing to get started with their career in hotel management.
4. Grievance Management: No hotel is perfect enough to receive zero complaint throughout a year. There are always some sorts of grievance coming from customers or stakeholders that require effective handling in order to avoid making them experience any discomfort, disappointment or unfavorable situation. This is exactly where grievance management comes in handy.
5. Health, Tenacity & Physical Fitness: Contrary to regular backend desk jobs at corporates, hotel management positions are physically demanding, and require an individual to experience excruciatingly long working hours and be on their feet or in motion almost all the times. Therefore, it is very important to cultivate good health, robust tenacity and be at the peak of physical fitness for meeting the on demand requirements from multiple verticals that are typical of a hotel environment.

If one is comfortable with the above-mentioned challenges, then hotel management is one of the finest and most rewarding career choices they can make.

Why Should One Become A Hotel Manager? What Are The Key Benefits?

There are many perks of being a hotel manager. A hotel manager enjoys some of the highest benefits of being employed at a hotel. It gives an individual the status and managerial authority required to govern the important aspects of hotel strategy and operations. Following are some of the key benefits:

1. High Payscale: A hotel manager typically enjoys a good pay scale comparable to the top tier positions associated with the hotel industry. Usually, the salary level is just below that of regional chef and casino manager. While a new hotel manager enjoys a package range of USD 40K to USD 45K, someone with experience typically enjoys somewhere around USD 60k.
   
2. Leadership Experience: One of the major duties of a hotel manager is to motivate teams and ensuring that their morale is high. This automatically instills in them the professional leadership qualities that help them to gain higher authoritative positions in hotels and other industries of the hospitality sector.
   
3. Relationship Management: A hotel manager is usually at the forefront of handling customer grievances when a subordinate commits a mistake. They have to address issues and escalations by keeping in mind that healthy relationship is preserved at both their customers’ as well as their teams’ ends. With practice, a hotel manager earns relationship management skills that help them in excelling at team and managerial collaborations, negotiations and governance.
   
4. Overseas Opportunities: A hotel manager is often required to travel overseas and network with partners, personnel, teams, vendors and service providers in order to expand the hotel chain business. This not only enables them to get better at cross cultural management skills, but also opens several doors of working abroad at lucrative positions in world-class hotel chains.
   
5. Quality & Compliance Skills: A hotel manager has to oversee and govern the day to day hotel operations and decide on the short and long term strategies of the hotel. This automatically makes them gain the required knowledge and skill required for maintaining standardized quality of employee performance and ensuring that all the regulatory compliance parameters are met. With experience, a hotel manager acquires industry standard quality and compliance acumen that ultimately influences the brand reputation of the hotel, thus boosting their career scope.
   

How to Become a Hotel Manager

While there is no single correct means of becoming a hotel manager, one can surely take the following route to becoming a successful one who has a stable position at a reputed hotel chain:

1. Acquiring Relevant Work Experience: Before securing a managerial position at any firm, an individual has to work as an associate for a few years. A hotel, being an organization, is no exception. An associate has to learn all the nuances of hotel operations and gain the necessary practical hotel management skills before getting promoted to the position of a hotel manager.
2. Earning A Hotel Management Degree: A comprehensive three years graduate degree or a two years full time Master’s degree in Hotel Management is a sure shot of way of climbing up to the position of a hotel manager. There are some good universities offering graduate and post graduate degrees in hotel management including:

• Medhavi Skills University
• Johnson & Wales University
• International Institute of Hotel Management
• Institute of Hotel Management
• Christ University
  
  3. Working As An Apprentice: Being a practical field of work, hotel management programs are best when they offer apprenticeship opportunities. This is because students are required to undergo theoretical classroom learning and practical hands-on industry experience simultaneously for gaining an experiential education highly relevant to hotel management profiles. The above mentioned Medhavi Skills University is one such world-class educational endeavor offering apprenticeship embedded hotel management degree programs through their WISE (Work Integrated Skill-based Higher Education) framework. Students not only get to earn a full time degree, but also gain government recognized paid work experience at the same time, thereby boosting their employability and earning potential across reputed hotel chains.
  
  4. Exploring The Options Of Leveling Up: As mentioned above, an individual never starts their journey as a hotel manager. They have to work at the associate level and then climb up the position ladder. However, this path is far from being linear and straightforward. It is always encouraged, that while working at the associate level, one explores different verticals like food and beverages, room servicing, receptionist, etc to get a taste of different dimensions of a hotel, so that as a hotel manager, they are able to tackle any situation from multiple verticals. Earning awards, appreciations, reviews and recognitions during this tenure further strengthens the foundation of becoming a successful hotel manager. This method of acquiring multifaceted work experiences is proven to truly prepare an individual for a reputed hotel manager position.
  
  5. Adding Qualifications To The Resume: While hotel management degrees propel budding hotel managers towards a successful future, adding specialized diplomas and certifications further catalyzes the process. One can also pursue these short tenured qualifications prior to going for a full-fledged hotel management degree in order to assess whether they are truly comfortable in this field or which specialized vertical they feel would be best suited for their professional development. One can pursue such certifications from Medhavi Skills University that seeks to train people in discrete verticals of hotel management, so that employees are able to deliver the desired quality of performance at their specialized work category, and that the management is able to delegate different types of work to multiple specialized departments.

Final Thoughts

Becoming a hotel manager is the key aspiration of most people who are either studying hotel management or are currently working at a hotel. This means that more people are competing to secure this role for themselves, thus raising the competition bar. Therefore, it is always recommended to be strategic and tactful while gaining experiences for becoming a hotel manager. However, with the right experience, acumen and qualifications, one can surely become a successful hotel manager at a reputed hotel.