Hospitality Industry: The Lodging Segment The Lodging Segment of the Hospitality Industry

The lodging segment of the hospitality industry covers organizations that provide bed and rest services for people at night. They could be anything from a fancy hotel to a youth hostel, a campground or a highway side motel. A typical lodging organization has four primary departments: the rooms department, food and beverage, the sales and marketing department, and the human resource department (Stephen F. Austin State University, 2010).

The rooms department is composed of three service areas: front office, unformed services and housekeeping (Stephen F. Austin State University, 2010). The front office function is responsible for receiving guests, assigning rooms and rates, and answering visitors' questions about the organization and its surrounding community. The core responsibilities here include night audit, telephone, reservations, and cashier. The uniformed services function covers the roles of valet, doorpersons, and bell staff. Most properties have eliminated this function as a cost-reduction measure; however, they are still observable in major establishments (Stephen F. Austin State University, 2010). Valet representatives are responsible for helping clients park their vehicles. Doorpersons, on the other hand, are responsible for carrying clients' baggage from their vehicles to a bell cart, and literally holding the door for clients to enter the property. Then there is the bell-staff representative role -- the people responsible for taking clients' baggage to their rooms and introducing them to the...

Finally, there is the housekeeping function. Housekeeping representatives are in charge of cleaning guest rooms and doing laundry. The rooms' departmental manager is responsible for overseeing these three functions and inspecting the work of housekeeping representatives. They liaise with the human resource department on what kind of people to employ in housekeeping, front office and uniformed service roles. Moreover, since representatives from this department are the first to interact with clients and respond to their questions, the departmental manager could be a source of crucial information to the food and beverage manager on the specific food offerings that clients ask for or expect when they first enter the organization. Hospitality graduates can take up careers in this department as room departmental managers or front office managers, responsible for training front office staff.
Second in line is the food and beverage department. This is the division that operates lunch, breakfast and dinner. It comprises of the restaurant, specialty restaurants, and lounges and entertainment rooms, which focus mostly on alcohol sales (Stephen F. Austin State University, 2010). The food and beverage departmental manager is responsible for overseeing food preparation and seeing to it that food offerings meet client expectations. One of their responsibilities is to conduct market research to identify changing consumer tastes and preferences in relation to food offerings. The manager works together with the sales and marketing department to market the property as one which understands consumer tastes in…