Front Office Management: online course with internship agreement
Front Office Management teaches you how the front desk of a branded hotel works. You will learn to handle shifts and handovers, the night audit, the PMS and the chain CRS, rates and overbooking, and card payments under PCI DSS. It also covers guest data under the GDPR, group bookings and upselling. Study 100 % online for 180 days, with an internship agreement included, for €200.
- 180 days of access
- 100 % online, at your own pace
- Level: beginner · No prior experience required
- Assessment: 10 quizzes (50 questions) and a final project
- Internship agreement included
- Certificate with a verifiable QR code
- Languages: Spanish, English, French
- Price: €200
Who it is for
- People who want to start working at the reception desk of a chain or branded hotel
- Hotel trainees and new front office hosts who want to understand what the screen and the system are telling them
- Reservations staff who need to see how a booking travels from the channel to the arrival list
- Front desk staff moving towards supervisory tasks such as the night audit, group arrivals and upselling
What do you need to start?
Prior knowledge
- No prior hotel or front office experience is needed
- Basic arithmetic for percentages, averages and simple per-night calculations
- Comfort reading short legal and regulatory texts in English
Software and equipment
- A computer with an internet connection
- No specific software is required, and no PMS or CRS licence is provided; the course explains how these systems work rather than teaching one product
What you'll be able to do
- Write a shift handover entry and read a night-audit exception list before it is signed
- Build a guest folio, charging each extra per night, per person, per day or per stay
- Trace a booking from its sales channel to the arrival list and decide whether to change it in the PMS or the CRS
- Calculate how many rooms a hotel may safely oversell and what one walked guest costs
- Set a pre-authorisation and handle card-not-present payments and virtual cards in line with PCI DSS
- Decide which registration fields, ID checks, retention periods and CCTV practices the GDPR allows at a desk
- Reconcile a group rooming list against a contracted block and split charges between master account and folios
- Calculate occupancy, ADR and RevPAR and judge whether an upsell is worth offering
Skills you will practise
- Night audit
- Guest folio
- PMS and CRS
- Overbooking arithmetic
- PCI DSS v4.x
- GDPR guest data
- Pre-authorisation
- Rooming lists
- ADR and RevPAR
- Upselling
Syllabus
- The guest journey in a branded hotel: standards, shifts and handovers — Placing desk tasks in the guest journey, writing handovers, reading the night-audit exception list and building a correct guest folio.
- Two systems, not one: the PMS and the chain CRS — What the property system and the central reservation system each hold, where to change a booking, and how to handle interface failures.
- Reservations, rates and inventory: how a booking reaches the desk — Rate conditions, why an empty room may be unsellable, restrictions, channel availability, and the arithmetic of deliberate overbooking.
- After the DMA: direct booking, parity clauses and the OTA relationship — Agency and merchant models, commission arithmetic, parity clauses after the 2024 court ruling, and answering a guest who found it cheaper.
- Borders without stamps: EES, ETIAS and the 90/180 question at the desk — Counting days under the 90/180 rule, what the hotel cannot see, and where to send guests with border questions.
- Guest data under the GDPR: registration, ID checks and CCTV — Registration fields, checking ID without copying it, retention periods, marketing consent, lobby cameras and reporting a data breach.
- Taking payment safely: PCI DSS v4.x at the front desk — Cardholder versus sensitive authentication data, pre-authorisations, virtual cards from platforms, and the evidence that answers a chargeback.
- AI at the front desk: chatbots, voice agents and the transparency rule — Which systems fall under Article 50 of the AI Act, who owes disclosure, and taking over a conversation a bot has failed.
- Groups, tour operators and package travel law — Group contracts, allotments and release dates, rooming lists, master accounts, and the hotel's place in package travel law.
- Selling from the desk: upselling, rate integrity and the shift from volume to price — Occupancy, ADR and RevPAR, explaining date-based pricing honestly, valuing upsells, and keeping rate integrity at the desk.
Internship agreement
With this course, an intern could support front desk work such as check-in and check-out, shift handovers, building and checking guest folios, and preparing the night audit. Other suitable areas include reservations, reconciling arrival lists between the PMS and the CRS, and preparing group arrivals from rooming lists, always under the supervision of the host company's staff.
The internship can run at the same time as the course, within the 180 days of access.
Frequently asked questions
What job does the Front Office Management course prepare me for?
The Front Office Management course prepares you for front desk and reception work in a hotel, particularly a branded or chain hotel. You learn the daily tasks of a front office host: shifts and handovers, the night audit, working in both the PMS and the chain CRS, taking payments, handling guest data, checking in groups and selling from the desk. It explains how these systems work rather than training you on a single vendor's product.
What could I actually do during the internship, and who finds the hotel?
You find the host company yourself; the school then issues the internship agreement and its annex, and the company signs electronically, usually within one to two working days. With this course you could help with check-ins and check-outs, handover notes, folios, night-audit preparation, reservation changes and group arrivals. Which tasks you get depends on the host company.
Which laws and standards does the course cover?
The course covers the regulations that reach a hotel desk in Europe. These are the GDPR for registration, ID checks and CCTV, and PCI DSS v4.x for card payments. You will also study the Digital Markets Act and the 2024 Court of Justice ruling on parity clauses, the Entry/Exit System and ETIAS, and Article 50 of the AI Act on chatbots. Package travel law is covered too, including Directive (EU) 2026/1024, which has been adopted but does not apply yet.
Isn't front desk work mostly about being friendly and using the computer?
Not quite. Many beginners assume the system does the work: that the night audit is just adding up money, or that other departments know something because it is in the system. In practice the system stores information and the handover passes it on. The real work is reading the exception list, knowing which system holds which data and understanding why a rate has conditions attached. These are the misconceptions this course corrects.
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Content updated: 07/10/2026