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20 Great Ideas To Steal In 2012

Start The Discussion | Stacey Peterson | September 12, 2012 00:01 AM

Are you playing it too safe, IT leaders? Take these InformationWeek 500 projects along to rev up your next brainstorming session.

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Hyatt Rethinks The Front Desk

At the busy Hyatt Regency O'Hare, guests can wait 10 minutes or more to check in. To ease that crunch, the hotel chain used technology to refine the role of its front desk staff at the Chicago hotel.

Hyatt renamed its desk clerks "hosts" and untethered them from the desk, arming them with Apple iPads equipped with a Hyatt-designed, custom-built iOS app. It also gave them custom-built PCI-compliant credit card readers, RFID encoders to provide room keys, and bar code scanners for reading guest confirmation slips.

Now Hyatt hosts can greet guests throughout the hotel to check them in and out. Hosts also are stationed at O'Hare airport, where they check in arriving guests at shuttle bus stations before they set foot in the hotel.

In a few weeks, the hotel went from being 107th in the company in terms of guest satisfaction scores to No. 5. Hyatt plans to have all its hotels onboard next year.