Introduction

Welcome to my reflective journal of my sandwich year of full time employment in the Majestic Hotel & Spa Barcelona.

Over the next 10 months I will be using this blog as a place to log my personal and professional development through the experiences I have as an intern in one of the most exclusive and famed 5 star hotels in the centre of Barcelona.

By creating action plans to aim for over the following year and beyond, I will enable myself to actively keep track of my progress, both personal and professional.

Action Plans

This year I have linked my action plans with more professional goals rather than personal looking at what I named my goals as in Applied Professional Practice. This is because I am spending the whole year here so I want to know more about the running of the company as opposed to just being in the treatment rooms and to do that I need to focus my goals on front of house and administration.

This is the most important as I have to learn the protocols of how to greet a guest and make a booking in both English and Spanish.

I would like to not only improve my retail skills, but to learn new techniques from experienced therapists giving me different ways to approach a sale.

As I will be very much involved with the administrative side of the spa in terms of orders and annual objectives, I feel this is a great opportunity to try as many tasks as I can to try which methods and ideas work best for me.

This goal is not just about understanding the tasks and why we do them, but also to really gain an understanding of what reception does and how they really carry the spa.

This is mainly important for the workplace as it will allow me to communicate with Spanish clients the same way as I do with english clients, however, a personal bonus is that it will improve my Spanish for every day life.

Transferrable Skills

These are just some examples of transferrable skills that I use in my job every day.

Problem Solving

Since working as a full time receptionist, I have had problems to overcome every day. This could range from a client complaint to lack of stock. By encountering these situations, I feel a lot more able to deal with them swiftly and in a way that will likely benefit everyone involved.

Organising
Organisation is very important when working on reception especially when it is a full day of treatments. It is receptions responsibility to assign treatment rooms to therapists based on the treatments they have and where would be the most comfortable for them. As well as this, reception must be able to tell therapists who's client is who's and what treatments they have next and whether anything has changed. being able to keep everyone in the team up to date on changes to the day is extremely important to avoid confusions and miscommunication.

Management and Leadership
Although I work on reception, I find myself possessing management and leadership qualities. However, I make a conscious effort to not use them as I am an intern and I do not feel as though it is my place to be assertive with my colleagues.

Negotiating
A form of negotiation within my daily role is when upselling treatments or products to a client. Making the recommendations as appealing as possible so that they will choose them almost without having to think about it.

Good Communication Skills

Good communication skills are vital to my role on reception. Not only do I have to be able to communicate clearly and effectively with the team, but also clearly with clients who may not speak very good english or Spanish, and it's down to me to try and find an alternative or simplified way of getting the information across. As well as this, interpersonal communication is important because reception is where all of the information arrives first. If it is misunderstood or misinterpreted this could cause problems further down the line.