A day in the life of a hotel representative abroad

06:45, arrivals hall, Rhodes airport. You're holding a clipboard with forty names on it and a sign with your tour operator's logo that's already peeling at the corner. Somewhere behind those sliding doors is a planeload of people who've been travelling since 3am, and in about four minutes they're all going to be your problem. Not in a bad way. Just, you're the one who knows where the coach is.

This is the job nobody really explains properly before you sign up for it. A hotel representative, or rep, is the face of the holiday company once the booking's been made. You're not cooking, you're not cleaning rooms, you're not behind a bar. You're the person guests come to when something's wrong, something's confusing, or they want to book a boat trip. It's one of the only seasonal roles where you represent a company to paying customers, rather than serving them directly, and that changes everything about how the job feels day to day. If you want to see what this role looks like in practice, TUI regularly hires for a hotel representative position across Mediterranean resorts.

In plain terms, a rep is the link between guests and the tour operator for the length of their stay. You handle airport transfers on arrival and departure days, run a welcome meeting within 24 hours of guests landing, and hold daily consultation hours in the hotel lobby or by the pool where anyone can come and find you.

You sell excursions, day trips and transfers, which is where commission comes in. You deal with complaints, from a broken air conditioner to a double-booked room, and you write up incident reports when something more serious happens. Some weeks that's a lost passport. Other weeks it's a guest who's convinced they booked a sea view and definitely didn't.

Back to that arrivals hall. By 07:15 the coach is loaded and you're doing a headcount for the third time, because someone always wanders off to find a coffee machine. The transfer takes forty minutes and you spend it half-asleep, half-reciting the welcome speech you could say in your sleep by week three of the season.

09:30, hotel reception. You hand out room keys, apologise for a mix-up with two twin rooms booked as doubles, and privately note you'll need to chase housekeeping about it before lunch. By 11:00 you're at your usual spot by the pool bar, laptop open, selling a catamaran trip to a family of four and trying to remember if the jeep safari runs on Tuesdays or Wednesdays this month.

Afternoons are yours, loosely. Maybe a welcome meeting for a group who arrived yesterday, maybe two hours where genuinely nothing happens and you catch some sun. Then at 18:40 your phone buzzes: a guest's bathroom has flooded onto the one below. You're not a plumber, but you are the person who calls the maintenance team, translates the problem, and sits with an annoyed couple while it gets sorted.

By 21:00 you're back at the airport for a late arrival, holding a sign again, smiling again. And at 22:00, before bed, you check the staff WhatsApp group one more time, because something always comes up between shifts. That's not an exaggeration. The phone stays close, even when you're technically off.

Most contracts offer a base salary, typically modest on its own, plus commission on excursion and transfer sales. That commission is where the real money sits. A rep who's good at selling can roughly double their base income over a busy summer month, while someone who treats sales as an afterthought will feel the difference in their payslip.

Accommodation is usually arranged by the operator, often shared with other reps, and sometimes subsidised rather than fully free. Flights out to your destination and the initial training week are frequently covered too, which matters because the number printed on your contract isn't the whole financial picture. For a fuller breakdown of what's typically included, this guide to staff accommodation abroad is worth reading before you accept anything.

You need to be 18 or over and hold an EU passport or the right to work in your destination country. Languages matter more than any diploma: Dutch and English as a baseline, with German or French pushing your application to the top of the pile. A driving licence is often wanted, not always required.

No tourism qualification? That's genuinely fine. What operators actually look for is someone who speaks two or three languages comfortably, doesn't visibly panic when a guest raises their voice, and can hold a conversation with a stranger at 7am without having had coffee yet. If that sounds like you, the lack of a formal qualification won't hold you back. It's still worth polishing your application, and this guide on writing a CV for seasonal work abroad covers exactly what recruiters look for.

Nobody warns you properly about this bit. You become the complaints department for problems you didn't cause: the airline delayed the flight, the hotel overbooked, the weather ruined the boat trip. Learning to separate yourself from the complaint, rather than taking it as a personal failure, is probably the single most important skill the job teaches you. It's also one reason reps often move on to roles like team leader or resort manager within a couple of seasons, once they've proven they can absorb pressure without burning out.

Destinations like Greece and Spain are classic summer postings for this role, while winter brings a shift towards ski resorts in countries such as Austria, where the job effectively becomes a chalet or resort rep instead. If you're weighing up a winter contract instead, the current winter jobs listings are a good place to compare what's on offer right now.