My practical training in Hotel Verso

During summer 2021 I did my first practical training in Hotel Verso. Hotel Verso is part of a family-owned company called Yöpuu Yhtiö Oy. It is located in the pedestrian street in Jyväskylä city center. The hotel has 128 rooms which includes standard- and superior -rooms and also superior rooms with own sauna. For sauna-lovers there is also a public sauna that is warmed every evening. On one floor there are also a few rooms where the guests can bring their pets with them.

Along with the accommodation Verso offers conference rooms, two restaurants and a bar. The place where the conference room are is called Kerkkä and it offers capacity for meetings for 10 to 200 people. Restaurant Silmu is Verso’s breakfast restaurant, and its Finnish breakfast also tempts the residents of Jyväskylä to enjoy a breakfast made of near produced ingredients. Verso’s a la carte restaurant serves delicious dinner in beautiful surroundings and in Verso bar there is lunch served from Monday till Friday and you can also find different kinds of refreshments from there.

I started my practical training in house keeping and worked there for four days. There I learned the room types and that it is very important that the communication between house keeping and reception works. After that I went to the reception where I worked for the rest of my practical training. I was a bit nervous because I hadn’t done anything like that before, but I learned quite fast and enjoyed the work so much that I was excited to go to work every day! My duties included checking the guests in and out, answering the phone and emails, helping in everything the guests had in their mind and taking care of different extra tasks of the day such as taking pre-ordered additional services to the rooms. I also had one interesting task to design a few postings to Verso’s social media. Also, whenever I had time, I helped to serve the customers in the bar.

I loved my practical training in Verso very much and I am happy that it confirmed that working in a hotel is a thing that I want to do in the future as well. All the employees were lovely and took me well as a part of their working community. I also got an opportunity to keep working there besides my studies which made me really glad. Even though I worked for most of the summer, this summer was one of the best summers of my life so far!

Written by Susanna Niittylä

Bachelor’s degree programme in Tourism Management