My Internship

I am lucky to be able to do my internship at the Lisboa Pessoa Hotel, a 4-star hotel in the historic center of Lisbon, in the heart of the Chiado district.

Located between Rossio Square, the Carmelite Convent and Principe Rossio, it is an ideal place to visit Lisbon on foot.

A few minutes from the hotel is also one of the most famous belvederes in Lisbon, which offers a breathtaking view of the whole city, with the Castle of St. George in the distance.

This hotel is not classic since it is dedicated to the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa . Composed of 5 floors, the hotel has associated a character of Fernando Pessoa on each floor.

Here customers are looking for 4 star hotel quality of the services but also the proximity to the main attractions of the city. The hotel has 74 rooms, many of it have a balcony with a view on the city. There is also an indoor swimming pool , SPA, gym and massage services available. The advantage of this hotel is undoubtedly its restaurant on the 5th floor on the rooftop with the two panoramic terraces.

This hotel is a real Lisbon gem.

The Lisboa Pessoa Hotel belongs to the " Lux Hotels " chain which is made up of 7 other hotels in Portugal. It is the most recent of the chain since it opened in 2016 , at the same time as the hotel in Evora.

Process

I started my internship on April 5 , 2021, at that time, the hotel only showed a 20% occupancy rate. Here we are now in May, exactly 1 month later, this time the occupancy rate fluctuates between 40 and 50% .

This hotel is very popular with French and European tourists, but East Asian customers are also present.

During this month, I had the opportunity to discover the reception department, starting with the reception of customers, check-in, check-out but above all the use of the "Protel" reservation software. It was a real pain for me at first.

I had never worked in a hotel, and I don't speak the language of the country. You might as well say that understanding Portuguese abbreviations from a vocabulary very specific to reservations and more generally to hotels was a real anxiety.

From now on I can do them with my eyes closed. I just needed to practice.

The staff here are very friendly to me. Everyone speaks very good English and some of them make the effort to tell me a few words of French.

We use our bored times to improve my Portuguese and teach me vocabulary. Every action, every discussion is a good excuse to increase my vocabulary.

I had the opportunity to spend some time with the manager who manages the housekeeping in the hotel, it is extremely strict and everything had to be done in a specific order.

I also had the chance to visit the restaurant kitchen as well as the restaurant / bar and the staff who work there.

I realize that the hotel industry is an exciting but very complicated field, especially because of the hours. For the moment I work from 3:30 p.m. to midnight , special hours but very pleasant in my opinion. Next week my schedules are changing and I will work from 7:30 am to 4:00 pm ... I am immediately less happy.

schedule change:
7:30 am-4pm

I started my internship with daytime schedules , that is to say from 9:30 am to 6 pm in order to be able to glimpse the work carried out in the morning as well as in the late afternoon. Subsequently I spent three weeks on late afternoon hours from 3:30 p.m. to midnight. Being now on morning hours (7:30 am to 3:30 pm) , I am not surprised to see that working in the evening is more pleasant.

At first, the atmosphere is not the same. The end of the day is often synonymous with check-in . In other words, this is the time when clients first arrive at the hotel. It is the reception, the registration etc ...

The atmosphere changes quickly and becomes calmer when night comes. It is the start of the parade of food deliveries for some of the hotel's guests.

Then the work is different. we work more in the back office , on the preparation of check-outs and check-ins for the next day. We are less solicited directly by customers so the work is better done and errors less recurring. A checkout work of the reception and the restaurant is carried out. This step is tedious and time consuming. The staff will not leave until the accounts are good, even if it means calling the manager at midnight.

Anecdote:

One evening, while my colleague and I were working alone in the evening, a client called us from his room to ask for a crib for the night. This kind of service is usually provided by the hotel cleaning services which were no longer working at this late hour. So we found the cradle and all the equipment by ourselves.

The rest was more delicate. From our 20s, neither my colleague nor I knew how to assemble a cradle even by following the instructions. So we called a colleague to finally explain to us remotely how to assemble a cradle. Then we realized once all prepared that it would not fit in the elevator. We therefore dismantled everything and reassembled everything on the 4th floor, where the room was. It was a tiring evening.

Here we are in the middle of May, I was able to observe a clear improvement in the occupancy rate which was at 20% at the beginning of April and which now oscillates between 50 and 80% . We also note that a large part of the hotel's clientele turns out to be French.

Anecdote:

One afternoon, 6 check-ins were carried out. They were all French, not a single Portuguese or Spanish. My colleagues do not all speak French so I was able to help them.

Me voilà à la fin du mois de Juin. L'hôtel se remplit régulièrement à 100%, les clients français sont nombreux et la vie touristique de Lisbonne repart de plus belle malgré quelques restrictions les week-end.

Je continue d'apprendre chaque jour de nouvelles choses cependant après presque 3 mois de stage, je commence à ressentir un début de lassitude qui me donne envie de me tourner vers les autres départements de l'hôtel.

Si je me suis habituée au travail, mon corps lui ne s'est toujours pas adapté aux changements d'horaires. Il est tout à fait récurrent d'alterner entre le travail de matin et de soir au cours de la même semaine.

My Internship

Process

schedule change: 7:30 am-4pm

schedule change:
7:30 am-4pm