Top 12 Hotel General Manager Skills to Put on Your Resume
Landing a role as a hotel general manager means proving you can steer people, read the business, and keep operations humming without breaking a sweat. Show the skills that mix big-picture thinking with on-the-ground execution, and you’ll look like the person who can lift a property’s service, revenue, and reputation all at once.
Hotel General Manager Skills
- Leadership
- Budgeting
- Revenue Management
- Customer Service
- OPERA PMS
- Housekeeping Oversight
- Marketing Strategies
- Team Building
- Event Planning
- Hospitality Law
- Safety Protocols
- Multilingual
1. Leadership
Leadership, for a Hotel General Manager, is the daily act of setting standards, inspiring teams, and directing the property toward sharp guest satisfaction and firm financial targets. Calm in storms, decisive in gray areas, present when it matters.
Why It's Important
It shapes culture, sharpens service, and speeds decisions. Strong leadership translates into consistent operations, happier guests, and reliable results that owners actually feel.
How to Improve Leadership Skills
Focus on habits that elevate your influence and clarity.
Build emotional intelligence: notice stress signals, read the room, respond with poise. Coach, don’t just correct.
Tighten communication: crisp directions, open forums, and follow-through. Say what success looks like, then show it.
Think strategically: lift your gaze beyond today’s arrivals—know your market cycles, competitors, and cost drivers.
Empower the front line: delegate authority with guardrails. Recognition fuels consistency; silence starves it.
Keep learning: peer networks, workshops, and regular post-mortems. Improve the system, not only the people.
How to Display Leadership Skills on Your Resume
2. Budgeting
Budgeting means forecasting demand, allocating resources, and controlling spend so the hotel runs lean without cutting into guest experience.
Why It's Important
It’s the guardrail for every choice—labor plans, rate strategy, capital projects. Good budgets predict. Great ones guide the right tradeoffs in real time.
How to Improve Budgeting Skills
Mine history for patterns: segment by channel, weekday/weekend, season, and pace. Spot drift early.
Forecast with rigor: blend historicals with market intel and events. Align revenue, labor, and procurement to the same forecast.
Control big-ticket costs: labor, utilities, F&B COGS. Build rules for flexing schedules to occupancy and pick-up.
Co-create with leaders: department heads own their numbers when they help build them.
Monitor monthly—and mid-month: dashboards, variance analysis, swift corrective actions. Don’t wait for month-end to fix course.
Reforecast: when demand shifts, so should your plan. Nimble beats perfect.
How to Display Budgeting Skills on Your Resume
3. Revenue Management
Revenue Management is the art and math of pricing the right room to the right guest at the right time—controlling inventory and rates to maximize total revenue, not just occupancy.
Why It's Important
It turns demand signals into dollars. Strategy here affects profit more than almost any other lever in the hotel.
How to Improve Revenue Management Skills
Know your demand drivers: track citywides, flight capacity, local events, competitor moves. Act before the market surges.
Use dynamic pricing: implement clear fences and change rates with pace, pickup, and competitor positioning. A modern RMS helps.
Balance distribution: grow direct bookings while keeping OTA visibility smart and profitable. A channel manager reduces friction.
Lift total revenue: upsell room types, add-on packages, parking, spa, late check-outs. Train teams and automate offers.
Audit rate integrity: eliminate leakage and parity issues. Protect your brand rate.
Iterate relentlessly: weekly reviews of KPIs—ADR, RevPAR, GOPPAR, contribution margin by channel. Adjust, test, repeat.
How to Display Revenue Management Skills on Your Resume
4. Customer Service
Customer service is the full arc of the guest journey—how welcome they feel, how quickly issues vanish, how smoothly every touchpoint flows.
Why It's Important
Service wins loyalty, and loyalty fills rooms. Reviews, referrals, repeat stays—your P&L feels the ripple.
How to Improve Customer Service Skills
Personalize: capture preferences and act on them. The small details—pillows, late arrivals, quiet floors—carry weight.
Train for judgment: give staff the latitude to fix problems on the spot. Clear service recovery limits, quick escalation paths.
Streamline journeys: fast check-in, simple payments, responsive messaging. Reduce friction wherever you can.
Close the loop on feedback: ask, respond, resolve, and log the learning. Trends inform training and process tweaks.
Celebrate service wins: recognize moments of care. Stories spread the standard faster than memos.
How to Display Customer Service Skills on Your Resume
5. OPERA PMS
OPERA PMS (including OPERA Cloud) is the system-of-record for reservations, front office, billing, housekeeping status, and more—central to efficiency and data-driven decisions.
Why It's Important
It unifies operations, reduces handoffs, and surfaces guest and revenue insights. When OPERA runs clean, your teams move faster.
How to Improve OPERA PMS Skills
Train deeply and often: cross-train roles, certify super-users, refresh after updates. Turn power users into floor coaches.
Tailor workflows: configure screens, templates, and alerts to match your property’s reality.
Integrate wisely: connect OPERA with channel managers, RMS, POS, CRM, and guest messaging to eliminate duplicate work.
Maintain hygiene: clean rate codes, accurate market segments, tight user permissions, routine audits.
Exploit reporting: build dashboards that matter—pace, pickup, no-shows, housekeeping turns, payment exceptions.
How to Display OPERA PMS Skills on Your Resume
6. Housekeeping Oversight
Housekeeping oversight is the daily system behind spotless rooms and pristine public spaces—staffing, supplies, inspections, and swift turnarounds.
Why It's Important
Cleanliness drives guest trust and review scores. It’s also a safety and brand standard, not a nice-to-have.
How to Improve Housekeeping Oversight Skills
Standardize the playbook: clear SOPs, visual checklists, and room-by-room standards that leave nothing fuzzy.
Train with purpose: demos, refreshers, and buddy shifts. Make safety, speed, and detail co-exist.
Schedule to demand: sync staffing to arrivals, departures, and stayovers. Tech that tracks room status in real time helps.
Inspect and coach: surprise checks, quick feedback, trend tracking. Fix processes, not just individual slips.
Tighten inventory: linens, amenities, chemicals—par levels and reordering rules that prevent scramble and waste.
How to Display Housekeeping Oversight Skills on Your Resume
7. Marketing Strategies
Marketing brings the right guests to your doors—through brand, content, search, social proof, partnerships, and offers that actually resonate.
Why It's Important
It fuels demand and keeps your mix healthy. Visibility without relevance burns money; strategy turns attention into bookings.
How to Improve Marketing Strategies Skills
Strengthen your website: fast, mobile-first, clear rooms and rates, irresistible imagery, direct-booking perks.
Win search and social moments: local SEO, compelling posts, short-form video, and stories that spotlight guest experiences.
Own the inbox: segmented email, triggered journeys (pre-arrival, in-stay, post-stay), and seasonal campaigns.
Nurture reviews: ask, respond, learn. Authentic replies boost trust and ranking.
Smart paid media: targeted search and social ads, retargeting warm audiences, measure ROAS, prune what doesn’t pay.
Bundle value: local partnerships and packages—dining, attractions, transport—so guests say yes faster.
Reward loyalty: points, perks, upgrades. Make returning the obvious choice.
How to Display Marketing Strategies Skills on Your Resume
8. Team Building
Team building is how a GM turns departments into a single service organism—trust, communication, and shared wins.
Why It's Important
Teams that gel move faster and make fewer errors. Guests feel the difference in every interaction.
How to Improve Team Building Skills
Set the tone: respect in public, coaching in private. Celebrate small wins loudly.
Create open channels: regular stand-ups, one-on-ones, and a simple way to surface ideas or concerns.
Mix people up: cross-training and interdepartment projects build empathy and resilience.
Invest in growth: workshops, certifications, job shadowing. Career paths keep talent.
Make play purposeful: occasional team activities that strengthen trust, not just tick a box.
How to Display Team Building Skills on Your Resume
9. Event Planning
Event planning inside a hotel means orchestrating meetings, banquets, and celebrations so timing, staffing, and service click without friction.
Why It's Important
Events boost revenue, fill rooms midweek, and create word-of-mouth. Get them right and you become the go-to venue.
How to Improve Event Planning Skills
Start with the client’s vision: probe for must-haves, deal-breakers, and success criteria. Then engineer backward.
Use the right tools: event management software for timelines, BEOs, room blocks, and change tracking.
Design a rock-solid BEO process: version control, sign-offs, and cross-department briefs. No surprises on event day.
Rehearse the handoffs: sales to catering to operations. Clear ownership at every step.
Sell the space: updated floorplans, virtual walkthroughs, and photo-worthy setups that spark ideas.
Debrief every event: gather feedback, note friction points, and fix the system before the next one.
How to Display Event Planning Skills on Your Resume
10. Hospitality Law
Hospitality law covers the rules that govern hotels: guest rights, liability, licensing, employment, accessibility, safety, data privacy, and contracts.
Why It's Important
Compliance protects guests and the business. It also shields the brand from fines, lawsuits, and reputational harm.
How to Improve Hospitality Law Skills
Stay current: track local, state, and national updates that touch lodging, food safety, employment, and privacy.
Train the team: onboarding and refreshers on safety, harassment prevention, data handling, and cash/card controls.
Embed compliance: SOPs, checklists, and incident logs that make the right behavior the default.
Consult pros: maintain access to counsel familiar with hospitality to review policies and tricky situations.
Audit routinely: permits, contracts, signage, ADA considerations, vendor certificates—verify, file, repeat.
How to Display Hospitality Law Skills on Your Resume
11. Safety Protocols
Safety protocols are the playbook for keeping guests, staff, and property secure—emergency response, health standards, physical security, and compliance.
Why It's Important
Safety builds trust. It reduces accidents, limits liability, and keeps the operation resilient when the unexpected hits.
How to Improve Safety Protocols Skills
Run risk assessments: inspect facilities, review incident history, and prioritize fixes. Repeat quarterly.
Train everyone: fire safety, first aid, food handling, conflict de-escalation, data and key control.
Upgrade the toolkit: access control, cameras in critical areas, panic devices, cyber safeguards for guest data.
Inspect and test: alarms, extinguishers, egress routes, generator, water quality. Document everything.
Plan for emergencies: roles, communication trees, drill schedules, vendor contacts. New staff practice on day one.
Listen and adapt: easy reporting for hazards and near-misses. Fix fast, share learnings.
How to Display Safety Protocols Skills on Your Resume
12. Multilingual
Multilingual capability means speaking with guests and staff in their language—literally. It smooths service, reduces misunderstanding, and welcomes more travelers.
Why It's Important
Broader communication opens doors to new markets, better guest rapport, and higher satisfaction scores.
How to Improve Multilingual Skills
Practice daily: short, consistent sessions beat long, irregular ones. Focus on hospitality phrases and scenarios.
Immerse smartly: podcasts, shows, menus, signage—learn what you’ll actually use at the hotel.
Take structured lessons: target business and service vocabulary; build speaking confidence fast.
Speak with natives: exchanges with colleagues or local communities. Real conversations cement learning.
Use it on shift: greet, confirm, explain—in the guest’s language where possible. Fluency grows in the wild.
How to Display Multilingual Skills on Your Resume
