A restaurant receptionist answers the phone, takes and confirms bookings, greets and seats guests, runs the waitlist and records cancellations. Skai Solutions notes the award pays the role A$25.74 to A$27.97 an ordinary hour, classified by those duties and not by job title.
The job has a front-of-room half and a phone half, and most job descriptions written for it only describe the first one. In a full service venue the duties are:
The two halves fight each other, and that conflict is the whole reason this role is hard to staff. A receptionist walking a party to table 12 cannot answer the phone. A receptionist on a five minute call about a birthday cake cannot seat the queue that has just formed at the door. Every venue solves this by deciding which one it is willing to lose, usually without saying so out loud.
This is where the job description meets the law, and it is the part that catches operators. The Restaurant Industry Award MA000119 does not classify people by the title on the roster. It classifies them by the duties they actually perform. A person you call a receptionist is being paid as a food and beverage attendant at whichever grade matches the work, and the grade sets the rate.
These are Fair Work Ombudsman rates from the pay guide published 24 June 2026, applying from the first full pay period starting on or after 1 July 2026. Adult, full time and part time, ordinary hours.
| Level | Ordinary hourly | Casual, ordinary hours |
|---|---|---|
| Introductory | A$25.74 | A$32.18 |
| Level 1 | A$26.44 | A$33.05 |
| Level 2 | A$27.08 | A$33.85 |
| Level 3 | A$27.97 | A$34.96 |
The casual column is the ordinary rate plus the 25% casual loading. Now the trap, and it is a common one. Those casual figures happen to be identical to the full time Saturday rates, because both work out at 125% of ordinary. It is very easy to look at that and conclude a casual working a Saturday is also on 125%. They are not. The award sets casual weekend and public holiday rates separately, and you must never build them by stacking the loading on top of a penalty. Take casual weekend rates from the Fair Work pay tool every time. Our page on hospitality award pay levels sets out all seven classifications, and casual loading in Australian hospitality works the loading properly.
Skai Solutions' own arithmetic on those published rates, inputs shown: a casual Level 2 host rostered 30 hours a week across weekdays costs A$1,015.50 a week in ordinary hours, about A$4,400 a month before a single weekend penalty, superannuation or leave loading is added. That is a real number to hold any phone solution against.
Written the way a venue actually needs it, with the phone duties given equal weight rather than tacked on at the end.
Purpose. Own the first contact a guest has with the venue, whether that contact arrives at the door or on the phone, and convert it into a seated table.
Responsibilities. Answer all inbound calls within three rings during trading hours. Take, confirm, amend and cancel bookings in the venue's booking system. Greet and seat arrivals, manage the waitlist and communicate accurate wait times. Maintain the floor plan and coordinate turns with section leaders. Answer menu, allergen and access questions accurately, escalating anything you are not certain of. Record deposits and card guarantees. Hand supplier and staff calls to the right person without interrupting service.
What good looks like. No call rings out during service. No guest is seated at a table that is about to be needed. Cancellations are recorded the moment they arrive, not at the end of the night.
Classification. Restaurant Industry Award MA000119, at the level matching the duties above. Confirm the level against the classification schedule in the award, not against the job title.
Two places, both predictable.
The first is the 6pm to 8pm window on a Friday and Saturday. That is when arrivals and calls peak at the same moment, and one person cannot be in two of them. The role does not fail gradually here. It fails completely for about ninety minutes and then recovers, which is why owners looking at a whole shift often conclude the phone is fine.
The second is after close. Cancellations do not respect trading hours, and they are not a rounding error: the Resos No-Show Index 2026, built from 3,768,761 reservations at 2,417 restaurants over a year to 31 July 2026, found that 56% of cancellations, 317,541 of 566,049, arrived within 24 hours of the booking or after it had already started, with 7.1% landing after the start time. A cancellation that reaches you at 11pm is a table you can still resell. A cancellation sitting in voicemail until 10am is a table you lost. Our page on restaurant no-shows works that data properly.
They are different problems and they have different answers. If your queue at the door is the bottleneck, you need a person, and no software substitutes for someone who can read a room and move a party from the bar to a table that has just cleared. If your bottleneck is that the phone rings out during those ninety minutes, you are paying A$4,400 a month for a role whose failure mode is entirely on the phone side.
Most venues need both, split by hours rather than by title: a person on the floor when the room is full, and something that answers every call at once during the window when the person cannot. That is what an AI receptionist is for, and whether an AI receptionist works is the honest version of that question. If you are pricing the alternatives against each other, the cheapest way to get a restaurant phone answered compares all five categories.
Fine dining, anywhere with a queue, anywhere the room needs reading, and anywhere the first impression is the product. If a guest is paying A$150 a head, being greeted by nobody is a defect no phone system can offset. Software is the right answer for the calls that arrive while that person is doing their actual job. It is the wrong answer for the job itself.
Skai Solutions answers every call at once during the window your host cannot, takes the booking, and records the late cancellation while the table is still resellable.
Book a Free DemoAnswering the phone, taking and confirming bookings, recording cancellations, greeting and seating guests, running the waitlist and quoting accurate waits, holding the floor plan, answering menu and allergen questions, taking deposits, and routing supplier and staff calls without interrupting service.
It depends on the duties, not the title. The Restaurant Industry Award MA000119 classifies people by the work they actually perform, using the classification schedule inside the award, so a person called a receptionist is paid as a food and beverage attendant at the grade matching their duties. Check the schedule rather than the job title.
On Fair Work Ombudsman rates applying from the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2026, ordinary hourly rates run A$25.74 at the introductory level, A$26.44 at Level 1, A$27.08 at Level 2 and A$27.97 at Level 3. A casual adds the 25% loading, so Level 2 casual ordinary hours are A$33.85.
No, and this is the most common payroll error in hospitality. The award sets casual weekend and public holiday rates separately. Never stack the 25% casual loading on top of a weekend penalty and never assume a casual keeps the full time penalty. Take casual weekend rates from the Fair Work pay tool for the award.
In practice yes, and both are classified by duties under the award rather than by the name on the roster. The difference operators mean is usually emphasis: a host is described by the door duties and a receptionist by the phone duties, but the same person almost always does both.
Between about 6pm and 8pm on a Friday and Saturday, when arrivals and calls peak together and one person cannot be in both, and after close, when cancellations arrive with nobody to record them. The Resos No-Show Index 2026 found 56% of cancellations arrive within 24 hours of the booking or after it has started.