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Unfriendly Hostel Staff?

Front Desk Operations

Josh started this discussion 15 years 8 months ago

I added some more ideas to the "staff" section of the How to Improve Hostel Reviews Wiki page.

Some things that I think help make front desk staff more friendly are:

employees who go beyond just providing the minimum answers to the questions and provide additional information that would probably be useful to the guests.
employees who have a genuine interest in helping other people and helping guests discover how interesting the destination is (it's easy to tell whether someone enjoys helping people, or whether they would prefer for you to leave so they can go back to surfing the Web).
employees who don't just answer questions, but who also ask questions -- for example, "what did you do today?", "what do you think of the city?", and other questions/conversations that show the guests that the staff is genuinely interested in them.

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Scotch Argus

15 years

I think this is totally crucial to the hostel experience. People definitely expect friendly and helpful desk staff, perhaps even more so than they would in a large hotel. I guess it's the personal touch that is needed. How you make that happen is difficult, recruiting and retaining if possible the right people is key. I tend to think it's almost unteachable - some people are happy and chatty type of people, and others are not. If you employ happy people the place will usually be happy, employ miserable people and that's the vibe the place will have. Especially in the morning, if people have even a small chat to the receptionist they'll leave the place happier.

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nyrie

15 years

I totally agree. And at the end of the day you are meeting really nice people from all over the world, with some amazing stories to tell, its not hard to be friendly and interested in them. i dont understand the minset of rude/miserable people with a chip on their shoulder. its a pretty good life in this industry (most of the time0;).

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PatrickO`D

15 years

In a Ideal world every employee would come to work motivated and happy every day, unfortunetly this is not that world. Employees tend to work for a hostel for a short period of time and therefore they have little to no loyalty to the business, especially workers doing "work exchange" as they will go back to travelling soon. We depend on this work arrangement to help keep our overhead down. There is a difference between efficiency and effectiveness, work exchange is more efficient due to its cost saveings but I do not think it is more effective than a properly hired, trained,motivated employee that has a stake in the long term success of the property. Staff performance is a management issue, I do not think one can manage effectively while sitting behind the desk. We need to motivate our staff better so that our guests do not have a negative experience at our property.

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