Luxury Lexicon 22 terms
Hospitality terms
Terms used in hotels, restaurants and guest service.
A
- After-sales service
- Support after a purchase, such as care advice, repairs, alterations and warranty handling.
B
- Back of house
- Work areas and activities away from customers or guests, such as a stockroom, kitchen or service office.
- Butler
- An attendant who gives hotel guests personal service through their stay, or who runs the table, wine and staff of a private household.
C
- Chef de partie
- A cook in charge of one section of a kitchen, such as sauces, fish or pastry, usually supervising a small team under the sous-chef or head chef.
- Clienteling
- Building lasting customer relationships through personal advice, useful follow-up and knowledge of a customer's preferences.
- Concierge
- A hotel employee who books restaurants, tickets and transport for guests and advises them; luxury stores use the title for client hosts.
- Consultative selling
- A sales approach that starts with questions about a customer's needs before recommending a product.
F
- F&B
- Food and beverage: the hotel or hospitality operations that prepare and serve food and drinks.
- Fine dining
- A style of restaurant with formal table service by a trained dining-room team, backed by a full kitchen brigade.
- Front of house
- The areas and roles that receive and serve customers or guests directly.
G
- Guest relations
- The hotel work of looking after each guest's experience of a stay: arrivals, preferences, special requests, feedback and complaints.
H
- HACCP
- Hazard analysis and critical control points: a method for identifying and controlling food safety hazards.
L
- Linen
- Cloth woven from the fibers of the flax plant, and by extension the sheets, tablecloths and napkins of a hotel or home, whatever their fiber.
M
- Mise en place
- Preparing and arranging ingredients, tools and service items before cooking or service begins.
N
- Net Promoter Score
- A customer feedback measure based on how likely people are to recommend an organization.
P
- Pastry chef
- A chef who makes desserts, pastries, chocolates and other sweet work, either in a kitchen's pastry section or at the head of a pastry kitchen.
Q
- Quality assurance
- Planned processes intended to give confidence that products or services will meet agreed requirements.
- Quality control
- Checks and tests used to determine whether products or work meet specified requirements.
R
- Revenue management
- Forecasting demand to set a hotel's prices, availability and sales channels so that its fixed stock of rooms earns the most.
- RevPAR
- Revenue per available room: a hotel's room revenue divided by all the rooms it had to sell, whether they were occupied or not.