How do you get into hotel management?

Start as a night auditor; preferably in the largest full-service hotel, with the most food-and-beverage, meeting and banquet, lounge and gift shop operations on premises, that you can get to hire you.

It's actually a pretty easy job to get as far as hotel front-office jobs go - the hours are crap. It runs in most properties at 11 at night to 7 in the morning, (and no, it can't be done in the daytime), which is why the demand exceeds supply when the economy is good and jobs are plentiful, and why supply doesn't exceed demand by much when jobs are scarce and you see more people competing for any job they can get (including hotel night audit jobs with crappy hours). You don't want to be there forever, but as you yourself pointed out, you're there to learn.

That's where you learn how the numbers go together and what affects them, essential know-how for the management of any business.

Pay attention to what you're doing in that job. Back in the day, experience was a plus, but if you brought along sufficient accounting skills to balance your checkbook the old fashioned way (using the form printed on the back of your bank statement, making the entries and doing the math; rather than just checking your balance online), you could be trained - balancing accounts, after all, is most of what the job of night audit is about. (Most business get audited by their accountants every quarter. Hotels are unique in that they get audited every night.)  Nowadays, nearly all hotels have computerized front desk management systems; so to too many hire-for-personality-and-train-for-ability hotel 'administrators' and the people they insist on hiring, the job consists mostly of going down a list of reports to be printed, and printing out, and collating and routing, several stacks of reports. If it wasn't for the fact that it's necessary to do a bucket check and confirm the rates of all your guests, and make sure your cash and credit card totals balance (as well as your restaurant and banquet checks if it's a full-service hotel), a trained monkey or service animal could do it. 

How many staff is needed for a 60 room hotel?

You need as many as you need. It's not a Navy ship: you don't have a "compliment" (I'm not a believer in organizational charts), but you've got a lot of work to do, and you need a number of people there who can get it all done.

Some people try to run a hotel without a 24-hour front desk, but with over 30 rooms (and anything smaller is a bed-and-breakfast, or a Mom and Pop), I wouldn't try anything like that. So the front desk has to be attended 24–7 -- 168 hours per week. Four full-time equivalent employees could get it done, with one odd shift left over for the general manager to take a turn at driving the desk each week (which is a practice I'd encourage anyway, especially in a property that small).

You're probably going to need more than four people. Between the inevitable scheduling issues, people calling off, occasional turnover, and some people who just don't want to work more than four days a week; if you try to get by with just four bodies, you're going to be vulnerable to incurring overtime pay. But on the front desk, you're still going to have the equivalent of four people working 40 hours a week, plus the extra eight hour shift.

What happens to restaurant/bar tips paid on card and how/when does the money get divided out between staff?

In a hotel, there's a line item on the night audit form (and any cash reports from restaurants or bars within the hotel that get fed into it), that is either deducted from the hotel's daily deposit (which will include all cash and credit card receipts for that day), or included among a list of cash paid-outs that is itself totaled up and deducted from the hotel's daily deposit; labeled "Charge Tips". It will be equal to the sum of all server tips charged to a customer's credit card.



This allows any tip amount due a server from a customer's check paid with a credit card to be paid, that day, from the cash drawer, without causing the daily deposits to come up short.

Originally appeared on Quora

How do hotels charge? (e.g., check-in is 1pm, check-out is 11am. If I am checking in at 3pm on Friday and leaving 10am Monday, how am I charged? Four days and three nights; or am I charged four full days?)

For your example, you get charged three nights.

To answer your question in a single sentence, if you don't want to know that much about it; your room, and any taxes that you pay on it, are applied at four a.m., give or take an hour, when we do the night audit. If you check out before the night audit, they will be manually applied. If you don't arrive until after the audit, they will be manually applied, and show up on the next day's revenue at the following night's night audit. (If the fact that you stayed four days, three nights, is a source of confusion, it's because we charge you per night, not per day.)

Still confused? Okay, Hotel Night Audit 101 coming up . . .

Each guest account (whether in-house, direct bill, or advance deposit), works just like your checking account at the bank.

Note the similarities between your check register (above) and a guest folio (below), that is, your 'bill' . . .