Front office is a business term that refers to a company's departments that come in contact with clients, including the marketing, sales, and service departments.
In the hotel industry, the front office welcomes guests to the accommodation section: meeting and greeting them, taking and organizing reservations, allocating check in and out of rooms, organizing porter service, issuing keys and other security arrangements, passing on messages to customers and settling the accounts.
In American professional sports, the term refers to upper management of a club, especially player personnel decision-makers.
Famous quotes containing the words front and/or office:
“Well, Mary, only six more days to go and your old Nathan will be out of the army. Haven’t decided what I’ll do yet. Somehow I just can’t picture myself back there on the banks of the Wabash rocking on a front porch. No, I’ve been thinkin I, maybe I’ll push on west, new settlements, California.”
—Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)
“Woman was originally the inventor, the manufacturer, the provider. She has allowed one office after another gradually to slip from her hand, until she retains, with loose grasp, only the so-called housekeeping.... Having thus given up one by one the occupations which required knowledge of materials and processes, and skill in using them ... she rightly feels that what’s left is mere deadening drudgery.”
—Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (1842–1911)