Working in the hospitality industry is a challenge, but it can also be quite rewarding. It is a challenging and engaging work environment where every day brings new challenges to tackle and figure out between you and your staff.

Being successful in the hospitality industry can be greatly aided by nurturing certain skills and practices. In this article, we will touch on what we believe are the 5 most important skills you need. We will also address why the skills presented are important.

With no further ado, let’s go through our list.

1. Communication Skills

Communication is the cornerstone of good guest relations. One must be able to speak to a wide variety of people who visit one’s establishment as guests.

Developing your communication skills can be immensely useful for a successful career in hospitality. Building relationships with guests, cross-selling and upselling, and dealing with crises all require you to be a deft hand at communicating and interpreting communication from others.

This is one of the most important areas to focus on. Being communicative with your own language and English is a big plus, but learning other languages to become a multilingual communicator can also be exceptionally useful.

2. Adaptability

If the Covid-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it is that life can throw us sudden and massive changes quite suddenly. Working in the hospitality industry is already full of unexpected changes on a day-to-day basis, but we’ve all learned that there are bigger changes that can occur, which can affect the world around us in very large ways.

As such, being able to adapt to these changes and make the most out of a changing situation is another very useful skill to have if you want to be successful in the hospitality industry.

Even putting a global pandemic aside, you might have to deal with changing management, changes in global travel, availability of supplies such as certain food types, and so on. Being able to keep a level head and go with the flow of what happens is vital to working towards the best possible outcome.

3. Multitasking Skills

Some people say that life is a juggling act. In the same way, the hospitality industry is also surely one as well. There is always something to handle, a guest to get back to, a deadline to meet, or some task that needs attending.

Being able to handle multiple tasks at once has become a crucial skill in the contemporary work environment of almost every industry, hospitality included. The advent of the internet and the availability of multiple lanes of communication has only exacerbated the problem.

Learning how to spin multiple plates at the same time is very important. Not only is it a great life skill to have, but it is also an asset in almost every job out there. Focusing some time and effort to master multitasking could be very beneficial to you.

4. Detail Orientation

The best hotel experiences for guests are in the details. When the service staff are able to remember things about them or provide them exactly what they needed, simply by paying attention, it creates a feeling of satisfaction like no other.

This is why being detail oriented is the next item on this list. Picking up on information guests communicate and remembering details when dealing with specific guests can be a huge asset in the hospitality industry.

So, consider learning this skill to be among your top priorities. It’s also a good soft skill that is adaptable to almost every other process-based activity out there, which is basically all of them. Additionally, there are apps and other digital means that can help you polish this skill or aid you in its practice.

5. Cultural Awareness

Last but not least, we have cultural awareness. The world has become steadily more aware of and sensitive towards the culture of different groups of people. This has also become increasingly represented in the hospitality industry as well. Cultural faux pas when dealing with guests are now taken more seriously than ever before.

As such, cultural awareness has become an increasingly vital skill in the hospitality industry. Having knowledge of the appropriate and inappropriate behaviors towards different demographics can help you provide excellent customer service to them without causing any discomfort.

In fact, most guests really like it when their servers show some understanding or awareness of their background. Whether it is through speaking the guest’s mother tongue or by being aware of cultural norms, many guests find servers aware of their culture preferable to those that are not.

These are what we believe are the 5 most important skills needed for the hospitality industry, especially if you want to do well in it. It’s a lot to take in at once, we know. But luckily, there are digital tools that can help you and your staff with these skills.

One such tool is our easy-to-learn, easy-to-use, highly-customizable digital concierge app, TripKit. We’ve written in detail about TripKit’s various features here on this very blog. But a quick summary is that it helps make sure the right staff can attend to the right request or booking by the right guest at the right time.

This means that TripKit can help you with the first four skills on this list. It allows for communication without errors, it provides you and your staff with relevant information in real-time so that you can be adaptable, can help you multitask by keeping track of all your requests or bookings, and is able to provide all relevant information needed to be detail-oriented.

As for the fifth skill, we do offer multilingual support so that’s already a big step forward.

If we’ve managed to interest you into taking a look at TripKit, you can do so at our website.