Laura Doherty

A day in the life of a reservations team! We open up the system at 8am, start taking calls, and answer all the emails that have come in overnight. Our calls can be for a number of things; they can be for reservations for spa, restaurant or rooms. We take enquiries for different treatments and any queries people have got who are staying with us would come through to us.

As well as looking after the Central Reservations team and the calls and the emails, I also look after the admin side of any training. I would schedule any training, and make sure that the candidates on that training turn up. I also have another role which is the recruitment side of the business, so it’s my role to sift through all the applicants we get, all those lovely CVs, picking out the ones that are right for us, giving them a call, schedule in an interview. And if they are successful I would follow up with the job offer letter and pop them on our onboarding system.

Back to customers. Though I’m not face-to-face customer service anymore, my favourite role is still dealing with the public and answering their queries on email and telephone calls.

The funniest question that we’ve got recently is can people take their dogs into the spas with them. Not my cup of tea, and the answer generally is no. Odd questions daily!

I can always remember my careers teacher asking me, knowing that I didnt have a career in mind, what I liked to do. So I told her that I liked going on holiday and planning things, and she told me that hotel, tourism and leisure would be the role for me!

I think these days it’s very unusual to be in the same job for that length of time, but this isn’t like most businesses. Our business changes continually; there are always new things happening.

Absolutely, but I couldn’t possibly divulge those! We’ve had TV presenters, we’ve had an opera singer, we’ve had lots of Ladys and Sirs.

A couple of years ago we got an allotment, so that does keep me quite busy! It’s quite nice to go and do something completely different to what my role is here.

Although work is quite full-on, there are lots of fun times. We’ve got great teams, and there are lots of giggles. We’re very flexible when we recruit. We try to work around you, so if there are any special things you do at a certain time each week, we can tweak the rotas to accommodate you.

So if they look on our website they can see the links through for our work with us brand. If there’s not a position on there that people want to apply for or think is suited to them, then they can drop us a line with their CV and we will have a little look and see if we can create a role. If not, we will keep their CV on file for a position that may come up.