Guide
Organising shift handovers at a hotel
A good handover takes five minutes and is prepared throughout the shift, not at the moment of leaving.
At a hotel, information changes hands at least three times a day, and each time something can get lost: a late arrival, a blocked room, a promise made to a guest. This guide covers how front desk, housekeeping and maintenance teams organise that moment, what makes it fail, and how to turn it into a habit that lasts beyond the first month.
Gaëtan Grond, fondateur de Front Desk
Dix ans en hôtellerie, en France et au Royaume-Uni, avant de créer Front Desk. Les guides de ce site sont écrits à partir de ce qu'il a vu en réception et avec les équipes clientes.
In brief
A handover succeeds when whoever is starting their shift can work alone, without calling back the person who just left. To get there: write throughout the shift rather than at the end, take five minutes to read together at handover, only pass on what isn't finished, and assign an owner and a deadline to every open matter.
What a handover is really for
There's only one useful test, and it isn't measured by how many lines were written: at the end of the handover, whoever is starting their shift should be able to work alone for the whole shift, without calling back whoever just left. If they call back, the handover failed, even if the sheet was full.
That test changes how you write. You don't pass on what happened, you pass on what isn't finished. A leak fixed that morning has no place in the 3pm handover: it belongs in the day's log. A leak still waiting on the plumber does.
It also changes how you measure it. A team that spends twenty minutes telling each other about the day is having a conversation, not a handover. A team that takes five minutes, and where nobody gets called back the next day, has found the right level.
The three-day test
Take a handover written three days ago and give it to someone who wasn't there. If they understand what was left to do and for whom, it was good. If they need to call someone, it wasn't.
The three handovers in a day, and what's at stake in each
A hotel doesn't do one handover, it does at least three, and they're not about the same things. Treating them all with the same blank sheet means writing the same thing three times over and missing what's specific to each moment.
Morning to afternoon
The busiest moment: departures have just finished, arrivals are starting. What gets passed on: rooms that won't be ready in time, requests guests made at breakfast, and issues spotted during cleaning. It's the handover where housekeeping and the front desk most need to talk to each other, and often the only one where they don't.
Afternoon to night
The most sensitive handover, because the night team is alone. What gets passed on: arrivals expected after closing, guests who need watching or looking after, the state of the till, and anything touching the building's security. A note missed here won't be picked up by anyone before morning.
Night to morning
The shortest, and the richest in time-stamped facts. What gets passed on: overnight incidents, the results of the close-out, early departures prepared in advance, and guests who arrived outside normal hours. The night team writes during the night: they have the time, the morning team won't.
Housekeeping and maintenance handovers
They exist too, and they're almost always verbal. The head housekeeper passes on rooms to recheck, maintenance passes on repairs waiting on a part. Because they're not written down, they get lost the first day off, and the front desk promises a guest a room that maintenance knows isn't available.
The four-step routine
A handover that works isn't a meeting, it's a short sequence that's always the same. The “always the same” matters as much as the “short”: it's what lets a temp or a seasonal worker join in on day one.
1. Write during the shift
This is the only step that takes discipline. Information noted two hours after the fact has already lost its detail, and a handover prepared right as you're leaving gets done from memory, so badly. Whatever happens gets written down within the minute, even in the middle of a busy check-in, even if you come back to finish the sentence later.
2. Read together, five minutes before the end of the shift
Whoever is leaving reads out loud what isn't closed. The other listens with no screen in front of them. These five minutes don't come out of the next person's time: they come out of the previous person's, or they never happen at all.
3. Ask questions right away
This is the first step that gets cut when things are busy, and it's the one that prevents callbacks later. One question is often enough: “What do I do if the technician isn't here by 10am?”
4. Confirm, and leave a record
On paper, both people sign the sheet. In an app, the read confirms itself. Either way, what matters is that someone can later know the information genuinely got through, and to whom.
When shifts don't overlap
Many properties have no overlap between two shifts, and nobody gets paid an extra fifteen minutes to talk. In that case, the handover is entirely written, and the first task of starting a shift is reading it. This is also the case where writing it down stops being a convenience and becomes the only option.
The six ways a handover goes wrong
They come up everywhere, whatever the size of the property. None of them is a question of how conscientious the team is: they're organisational flaws, and each one has a simple fix.
Saying everything out loud
A verbal handover doesn't survive the receiving person's next day off. It then gets passed on from memory, distorted, and nobody can check what was actually said. Speaking should comment on what's written, not replace it.
Preparing the handover right as you leave
The most common and costly mistake. Reconstructing eight hours of a shift in three minutes guarantees you'll forget what seemed minor: a guest's request, a supplier's call.
Passing on everything
A two-page handover doesn't get read. Every closed line left on the list makes the open ones less visible. What's finished belongs in the day's log, not the handover.
Writing with no named owner
"Someone should call the plumber back" belongs to no one, so it belongs to nothing. Every open matter carries a name, or at least a department, and a deadline in hours.
Judging instead of stating facts
A remark about a colleague or a guest has no place in a working document that management, and one day a third party, might read. Write the facts and what's left to do.
Never closing anything
A matter that runs through five handovers with nobody writing that it's resolved will eventually get handled twice, or not at all. Closing is as much a part of the job as reporting.
Building the habit in a team
The hard part is never deciding to start writing handovers. It's keeping it up by the third month, when the season is busy and the front office manager is off. Four things help.
Start with one department
The front desk, most often, because that's where information arrives. Housekeeping and maintenance follow once they see what's written gets read and acted on. Trying to launch everything on the same day produces a month of enthusiasm and then a drop-off.
Attach the handover to an existing habit
Nobody forgets to count the till. Placing the handover reading at the same moment, in the same order, makes it automatic within a few weeks. A new habit always sticks better next to an old one.
Show that it's being read
Nothing discourages a team faster than writing into a void. When a manager replies to a line, follows up on a matter, or thanks someone for flagging a detail, the team keeps writing. When nobody reacts for two weeks, the team stops.
Treat gaps as a timing problem, not a person problem
When a note is missing, the right question is "at what point should it have been written?", not "who forgot?". The first changes the organisation, the second makes people stop writing.
Seasonal and temporary staff
A team that turns over three times a year doesn't pass on its habits by osmosis. Written handovers then become the main training tool: someone new who reads the last fifteen days understands how the property runs faster than through any procedure document.
Paper, spreadsheet or app: when to switch
A notebook on the counter works for a long time, and it beats an app that's been badly adopted. As long as the team fits in one room and everyone works the same hours, there's no reason to change.
Three situations tip the balance, and none of them is about being modern. The first: housekeeping and maintenance need to write, but they never come through the front desk. The second: you need to know who's read what, because an important note was missed and nobody can say whether it was passed on. The third: you need to find a time-stamped fact months later, to answer a guest or an insurer.
A shared spreadsheet is an honest middle step, but it has a hard limit: only one person can have it open for editing at a time, and it's unreadable on a phone. That's almost always what tips teams into switching, not the price.
How to tell if it's working
No need to count how many lines get written: a team can dutifully fill in a document nobody reads. Three signs show up without any measuring tool.
Calls to people on their day off go down
The most reliable sign. As long as you're calling someone at home to understand an open matter, the handover isn't enough.
Guests don't have to ask twice
A request made in the morning and repeated in the evening means information fell between two shifts. It's the most common front desk complaint, and the easiest to make disappear.
Management can find a time-stamped fact without gathering everyone
When a dispute comes up three weeks later, how long it takes to reconstruct what happened is a direct measure of how well it was passed on.
The handover sheet to fill in
The document described in this guide exists as a spreadsheet and a printable sheet, with the useful columns and both signatures. Free to use, no email address required.
When the sheet isn't enough any more
Front Desk keeps the handover in an app built for hospitality: whatever isn't closed stays in front of the next team, without being copied out from one handover to the next.
- Everyone writes under their own name, from the front desk, a corridor, or a maintenance room.
- You see by name who has read a note and who hasn't opened it yet.
- A matter stays open until someone closes it, however many handovers it crosses.
- What was passed on can be found again through search, even three weeks later.
- The shift log stays open to the whole team on the free plan, with no time limit.
Frequently asked questions
How long should a shift handover take?
Five to ten minutes is enough when the information has been written throughout the shift. A handover that takes twenty minutes is almost always a sign it was prepared right as someone was leaving, reconstructing the day from memory instead of reading what's still open.
Should the handover be spoken or written?
Both, in this order: written first, then read together. Written alone lets questions slip through, spoken alone doesn't survive the first day off. When shifts don't overlap, everything goes through writing, and reading it becomes the first task of starting a shift.
Who should be there for the handover?
At minimum, whoever is leaving and whoever is arriving. At properties where shifts overlap, the head housekeeper or the maintenance manager benefit from spending two minutes at the front desk during the morning handover: that's where you find out which rooms won't be ready.
What's the difference between a shift handover and a shift log?
The log is written throughout the day and keeps everything that happened. The handover is a moment, the change of shift, and it only carries what isn't finished. The log feeds the handover: without it, the handover gets done from memory.
Does a small family-run hotel need a written handover?
Less often, and fairly so: when two people see each other every day, speaking does the job. Writing becomes useful the moment a temp, a seasonal worker or a substitute joins the team, and the day you need to prove information was actually passed on.