A Day In The Life

Hotel and Rail Consultant

I started working at Expotel in February 2007 on the Hotel Records department, updating hotel information in the system i.e. Email addresses, telephone numbers and rates.

Then moved onto negotiating room allocation with hotels, I felt could progress further within the company, and this role was more challenging. This job consisted of dealing with out bookings and negotiating with hotels regarding the amount of rooms we had allocated.

I started my NVQ in Customer service and I was visited around once a month by my trainer from Damar Business College. Damar offer NVQ training to people already in a full time job. I passed this NVQ in less than a year and Expotel were more than happy to allow me work on my portfolio during quiet hours and also allowing me to attend the college on day release.

From there, I moved to a new position which consisted of updating cost centres and dealing with any technical problems on the Evolvi rail system. This helped me broaden my horizons.

As Expotel were making Business Travel into a larger department, more positions became available on the Hotel & Rail Team. I applied for a job booking both hotel & rail and unfortunately due to not having any reservations experience, the Travel Manager felt I needed to have this skill in order to fulfil the job to its maximum potential.

I then applied for a job on the Hotel Reservations department and was prepared to drop my wage in order to learn the skills I needed for the Hotel & Rail Team. I was on corporate reservations for around four months and then another position became available on the Hotel & Rail Team, which I again applied for and this time I was successful in my application.

On a day to day basis as a Hotel and Rail Consultant I will take calls from many different clients. My colleague and I also deal with any emails requests that are received. There are many different tasks to be done everyday including; making hotel and rail bookings over the phone or by email request, ticketing rail bookings and making sure all rail tickets are posted out.

I really enjoy working for Expotel and can say that every experience I have had working here has been worth while.