Reception Team member Review

Greeting guest and checking them into their rooms ensuring great customer service along with checking all rooms have been cleaned to a high standard. Receiving calls and reservation queries form guest and handling payment details making sure all payment legislation and GDPR rules are followed. In the morning allocating housekeeping team their rooms for the day and checking the rooms after they've been cleaned to ensure they've been cleaned and set up to Premier Inn brand standards

Premier Inn provides a large amount of training through their online portal known as academy online which provides an overview of legislation relating to the hospitality industry. Interacting with guest on a daily basis and using Premier Inn's 4 moments of truth format for providing great customer service has been a real help and does provide an excellent template for transferable skills. Whitbread offers Apprenticeship programs all the way up to Level 5 for all team members that work at least 16 hours a week at no cost to the employee

The Lifetime apprenticeship provides transferable skills and not just Whitbread specific skills. The learning process is very flexible with coursework and meetings allocated during your time and convenience. Whitbread is very good at always making sure any visits with your trainer or Webinars that you have scheduled you are allocated time off work to complete them so they never interfere with your apprenticeship.

With all the meetings and webinars being conducted online and nicely spaced out it provides an easy flow to learning. The induction meeting was very informative and gave a good overview of what's expected and roughly how you should be progressing with your apprenticeship. One thing that could be improved is the flow and pacing of the learning as sometimes it doesn't match up with where you're working through on the online portal and seems to sometimes skip ahead or ask for endorsements for units you've not fully covered

Whitbread is very eager for as many team as they can to complete the apprenticeship so it very accommodating making sure line managers know they have to ensure the employee is off for their meetings and allow them time to complete work. The apprenticeship does ask your line manager to approve and endorse skills that you can demonstrate and this does sometimes take a while to arrange a sit down just with how busy your line manager is

My personal trainer is very helpful and is always willing and able to respond to any queries I have. He's able to help me get my ideas out and helps to rephrase or provide lean in questions to work I don't fully understand. He has been able to quickly adapt to my style of learning and is able to ask the right probing questions to get me to elaborate

An excellent aspect about this apprenticeship is that it is less focused on Premier Inn and Whitbread but focused on the industry as a whole. It helps you to gain a knowledge of if you were working in an independent hotel and not the large scale of Premier Inn so many things Whitbread would have specific departments for like how to forecast sales or set room rates the apprenticeship teaches you how you'd forecast sales or decided room rates as if you were running your own hotel

Many external events are mostly HR based and Whitbread doesn't offer many events for ordinary team members to drop in or gain experience from A few online courses are available as additional learning through Whitbread's Academy online but not much is provided to help team complete their Off the job training with most apprenticeships requiring 250 hours which is very hard to find with most coming from the team members themselves asking their line managers to contact other hotels or managers they know. This means the amount, ease and quality of any off the job training depends almost entirely on how well connected your line managers network within the company is as apposed to Whitbread running or having steps in place for team to gain these hours

Yes

Whitbread is a large company that offers many opportunities for those who want it and as it develops the partnership with Lifetime it does seem like more and more is offered to help the learners to complete their work. The hierarchy does make the leap now between team member and first management a lot wider than it used to be and I imagine most other hotel brands do

To progress in the company it's much easier to be at a larger site or one that's near other Premier Inns as the Hotels that are smaller or out of the way lack opportunities to progress. Whitbread has recently started to place popularity and name awareness higher on their criteria for promotions