Hospitality.

This book will lead you through the entire process and help you with all the decisions you'll need to make along the way, such as researching your market; setting your objectives and making a plan; finding the right property; cooking and menu planning; dealing with reservations, reception and billing; purchasing and serving delicious food and wine; managing your cash flow and accounts; and creating the WOW factor. Contents: 1. Substantiating the Dream; 2. Which Property and Which Business Format?; 3. Getting Started; 4. Setting Your Standard;5. Reservations and Reception; 6. Food and Beverage; 7. Housekeeping Issues; 8. Marketing and Advertising; 9. Bookkeeping and Financial Aspects; 10. Ancillary Departments; 11.Staffing; Appendix; Index

Hotels.

In the tradition of Kitchen Confidential and Waiter Rant, a rollicking, eye-opening, fantastically indiscreet memoir of a life spent (and misspent) in the hotel industry. “Highly amusing."—New York Times Jacob Tomsky never intended to go into the hotel business. As a new college graduate, armed only with a philosophy degree and a singular lack of career direction, he became a valet parker for a large luxury hotel in New Orleans. Yet, rising fast through the ranks, he ended up working in “hospitality” for more than a decade, doing everything from supervising the housekeeping department to manning the front desk at an upscale Manhattan hotel. He’s checked you in, checked you out, separated your white panties from the white bed sheets, parked your car, tasted your room-service meals, cleaned your toilet, denied you a late checkout, given you a wake-up call, eaten M&Ms out of your minibar, laughed at your jokes, and taken your money. In Heads in Beds he pulls back the curtain to expose the crazy and compelling reality of a multi-billion-dollar industry we think we know. Heads in Beds is a funny, authentic, and irreverent chronicle of the highs and lows of hotel life, told by a keenly observant insider who’s seen it all. Prepare to be amused, shocked, and amazed as he spills the unwritten code of the bellhops, the antics that go on in the valet parking garage, the housekeeping department’s dirty little secrets—not to mention the shameless activities of the guests, who are rarely on their best behavior. Prepare to be moved, too, by his candor about what it’s like to toil in a highly demanding service industry at the luxury level, where people expect to get what they pay for (and often a whole lot more). Employees are poorly paid and frequently abused by coworkers and guests alike, and maintaining a semblance of sanity is a daily challenge. Along his journey Tomsky also reveals the secrets of the industry, offering easy ways to get what you need from your hotel without any hassle. This book (and a timely proffered twenty-dollar bill) will help you score late checkouts and upgrades, get free stuff galore, and make that pay-per-view charge magically disappear. Thanks to him you’ll know how to get the very best service from any business that makes its money from putting heads in beds. Or, at the very least, you will keep the bellmen from taking your luggage into the camera-free back office and bashing it against the wall repeatedly.

So You Want to Buy a Small Hotel! is written with humor and tells it like it is, warts and all, the good things and the nightmares about running a hotel—the dream (with the nightmares!) lived for 11 years at the Rosebank Hotel in the Scottish Borders. It’s a ‘how-to’ book with a difference, anecdotal, full of practical, step-by-step advice, with warnings about pitfalls—a buyer’s hotel guide for dummies! Reading this book will give you practical insights into what it is really like to own a small hotel and enable you to decide whether running a small hotel is for you.