Show Me The Way: Hyatt's New Digital Signage

The Hyatt Regency Chicago, the chain's flagship hotel with more than 2,000 guest rooms and 200,000 feet of meeting space, hosts 180 large conventions and 430 small conventions each year.

With more than 1 million guests coming through, the hotel was looking for a way to help guests navigate its halls without having to keep staff members on hand to answer questions. The hotel also wanted to eliminate messy last-minute signs propped on easels in its halls.

It turned to solution provider AVT Communique, a division of Hospitality Partners, of Arlington Heights, Ill., for a digital signage solution that would help its guests find the information they need.

AVT chose a combination of NEC Display Solutions 40'' MultiSynch LCD 4010 and NEC MultiSync LCD 3210 large screen LCD displays to hang throughout the hotel to help guests. The hotel purchased about 60 of the displays and has them hung throughout the meeting and lobby space.

The solution runs content software from Omnivex, which handles the dynamic content and is able to serve up the appropriate information on each screen.

Displays on meeting levels can be configured to show custom schedules for conferences, and some are fitted with RFID readers that read RFID tags in attendees badges and serve up customized information. For example, one screen would show a guest's agenda and the other would show a map of that location.

AVT works in-house with Hyatt to manage the content and keep the system up and running.

"The content and the support are all managed by our team here on site. The hotel has a marketing director who is in close contact with our people that do the content so they let us know when they have special ads to run or internal promotions. We also work with our own sales department," said David Alter, project lead for AVT.

With such a complex system, there have been challenges for AVT.

"One of the biggest challenges I guess would probably be the infrastructure that needs to be put in place for the digital signage. In a hotel this large where you have so many different areas where you want to put these monitors, running the infrastructure and the networking and having that managed and put together is one of the bigger tasks. Then it's designing the content so that it makes sense," Alter said.

The system will continue to grow. Omnivex's latest Moxie content management software release has expanded database capabilities and the hotel is constantly looking for new ways to use the system to display information.

"With Omnivex releasing new software that makes things even more flexible for us and adding features, we want to make things more interactive," Alter said.

Touch screens are also an option in the future, and the project is expanding to other Hyatt hotels. Six are completed and two scheduled.