How to write a CV for a hotel receptionist role

What a front office manager checks first

A front office manager or duty manager reading your CV is not asking whether you're personable. They're assuming that, because you applied. What they're actually checking, in roughly this order, is: which property management system you've used, whether you've worked shifts that cover early/late/night rotas, and whether you've handled the things that go wrong at a desk — overbooking, a guest dispute, a float that doesn't balance, a fire alarm mid-check-in.

If your CV opens with a paragraph about being a "people person with excellent communication skills," it will be read the same way every other CV that says this is read: skimmed past. Hospitality hiring managers see that line on every second application. What stops the skim is a named system (Opera Cloud, Mews, RoomMaster, Protel), a number (rooms managed per shift, occupancy handled during peak), or a specific incident you resolved. Put one of those in the first third of the page, not at the bottom under "skills."

The systems and vocabulary that need naming, not implying

Generic phrases like "experienced with booking systems" tell a hiring manager nothing, because every PMS works differently and they need to know if they'll be retraining you. Name the actual system: Oracle OPERA PMS (or OPERA Cloud, which is now the more common deployment), Fidelio (older but still running in some independents), Mews, RoomMaster, Protel, or a smaller brand-specific system. If you've used more than one, list them — moving between systems is itself evidence you can pick up a new one fast.

Beyond the PMS, name the adjacent tools if you've used them: a channel manager or extranet (Booking.com Extranet, Expedia Partner Central), a reputation or guest-feedback platform (ReviewPro, Revinate, TrustYou), a GDS if the property takes travel-agent bookings (Sabre, Amadeus, Galileo), and the switchboard or PBX system if the hotel has one separate from the PMS. A large hotel's front office manager will recognise these names instantly; a candidate who lists none of them reads as someone who's only worked in very small independents, which may or may not be true of you — so say so if it is, and specify if it isn't.

Use the vocabulary of the job, not a paraphrase of it: night audit, not "overnight admin"; walk-in, no-show, and rate override, not "handling bookings"; upsell (room upgrade, late checkout, breakfast package), not "sales." A manager scanning fifty CVs recognises the trade language in seconds; a rewritten version of it costs you that recognition.

Qualifications, licences and certificates worth listing

Most hotel receptionist roles don't require a formal qualification to apply, but several credentials are common enough in this field that leaving them off looks like an oversight rather than an absence:

• NVQ/SVQ in Hospitality Services, or the Hospitality Team Member apprenticeship standard, if you hold either — these are recognised by UK hospitality employers specifically, unlike a general customer service qualification.
• First Aid at Work or Emergency First Aid at Work certification. Reception is often the first point of contact when a guest or colleague is unwell, and many hotels expect at least one certified first-aider per shift.
• Fire marshal / fire warden training. If you've held this responsibility, name it — it signals you've been trusted with evacuation procedure, which matters more in front office than in most other hotel roles because you're usually the one accounting for guests during a drill or real evacuation.
• Personal Licence (England and Wales) or equivalent, if the role involves serving or authorising alcohol sales from a reception bar or minibar restocking sign-off. Not every reception role needs this, but where it applies and you hold it, it's a genuine differentiator.
• Basic Food Hygiene Certificate (Level 2), if you've covered breakfast service or room service handovers, which many receptionists in smaller hotels do.
• Manual handling training, relevant if luggage assistance or porter cover is part of the role.
• DBS check (or willingness to undergo one) — worth a one-line mention if the hotel handles master key access or has a policy of screening front-of-house staff, which many chains do.

A language qualification or fluency is worth stating explicitly with the level, not just "conversational French" — international guests and group bookings are a routine part of reception work, and a hiring manager scanning for language coverage will look for this near the top, not buried in a skills list.

How experience is actually evidenced in this field

Hospitality CVs are weakened by vague duty lists — "checking guests in and out," "dealing with queries" — because every receptionist does these things and the sentence carries no information. What evidences real experience in this field is volume, context and outcome:

• Volume: how many check-ins per shift, how many rooms the property has, what occupancy you were regularly working at (a 200-room 4-star hotel running at high occupancy is a different job from a 40-room boutique running half-full, and the CV should let the reader tell which one you've done).
• Shift pattern: state whether you've worked earlies, lates, nights, or covered night audit specifically. Night audit is its own skill set — balancing the day's ledger, running the night's end-of-day process, handling late arrivals alone — and hotels that need night cover will scan for the word "night audit" specifically, not just "shift work."
• Rating or brand context: if you worked in a hotel with AA rosettes, a star rating, or under a brand with known service standards (Forbes Travel Guide, LQA/Leading Quality Assurance audits), name it. It tells the reader what standard of service delivery you've already been held to, which is otherwise hard to convey.
• Resolution, not just contact: instead of "dealt with guest complaints," state what kind and what you did — an overbooking resolved by relocating a guest to a partner hotel, a billing dispute resolved at the desk without escalation, a VIP or loyalty-tier guest handled to a specific standard. One or two concrete examples carry more weight than a bullet list of soft skills.
• Cash and float responsibility: if you balanced a till or float each shift, say so plainly — it's routine evidence in this field that you can be trusted with money and paperwork unsupervised, and its absence is noticed.

What candidates from this background routinely leave out

The most common gap on a hotel receptionist CV isn't a missing qualification — it's missing specificity in exactly the places listed above. In practice, three things get left off most often:

1. The PMS name. "Used the hotel's booking system" instead of naming it. This is the single most scanned-for detail and the most frequently omitted.
2. Shift availability and night audit experience. Many candidates assume it's implied by having worked in hotels; it isn't. If you can cover nights, or have run a night audit before, that sentence needs to exist on the page.
3. Language ability and the level of it. Receptionists routinely deal with international guests, and a hiring manager covering a property with heavy overseas footfall will look for this specifically — it's often left as an afterthought at the bottom of the CV rather than stated with the fluency level near the top.

A fourth, smaller omission: any mention of upselling outcomes. If you've regularly moved guests onto higher room categories, sold late checkout, or driven breakfast/package add-ons, that's commercial impact a hotel can put a number to, and it's worth a line even without an exact figure — "regularly upsold room upgrades and late checkout as part of shift targets" says more than nothing.

What to do next

Go through your current CV and check it against three questions: does it name the PMS and any other systems by name, does it state your shift pattern including whether you cover nights, and does it evidence at least one guest situation you actually resolved rather than a general duty. If any of those three is missing, that's the edit to make before you send anything else out.

If you're applying to several hotels with different systems, brand standards and shift needs, tailoring each CV to match the advert's specific requirements takes real time — jobmarket.pro reads each hotel's advert in full and prepares an application from one profile it can't invent experience into, matched to what that particular listing is actually asking for.