Hyatt staff teaches lesson in service - Hyatt Hotels Corp

Discount Store News, May 3, 1993 by Mike Harnett

For one day each year, Hyatt Hotel managers and staff share responsibilities and experience with the younger generation that may well prove to be their successors.

The youngers are fifth graders who participate in the Hyatt Career Day activities held in 80 hotels across the country. Starting at 8:30 a.m., these children report for work as doormen, housekeepers general managers, front desk clerks, pastry chefs and other jobs needed to operate a major hotel.

Some of them get to wear nifty uniforms with lots of brass buttons, while others have to wear a suit and tie and conduct themselves with the dignity befitting a hotel manager. By 10 am., each student has been paired off with an adult partner and they work together until 12:30 p.m., when lunch is served in the employee dining room.

While the publicity that Hyatt gains from each annual event certainly doesn't hurt business, the corporation's goals are much more long term. Hyatt president Darryl Hartley-Leonard explained: "By the year 2010, the industry will need an estimated 24 million employees, four times the current number. What better way to introduce young people to a career than to invite them to spend a day working in it?"

Camp Hyatt Career Day is an outgrowth of a program launched in '89, known simply as the Camp Hyatt Program. This is a pure customer service program designed specifically to help Hyatt Hotels anticipate and meet the needs of families traveling with children.

"More families are traveling and looking at traveling as a way to educate their children, " said Julie Halpern, director of the special marketing. "Nobody in the industry was addressing the special needs of children." She said Hyatt tried to see its various properties through the eyes of children and learned that the hotels don't have much to offer children, and may have been a bit too expensive.

To remedy these deficiencies, the corporation offered special rate programs in which children can have their own room for just half of what their parents pay. Children's menus were added to all of Hyatt's three-meal restaurants and the specialty restaurants now offer child-sized portions for any menu item at a lower price.

"We also wanted to make sure families felt welcome, starting with check in. Children get their own travel passport and after just a few visits, these passports qualify children to receive Camp Hyatt merchandise. But them real fun part of Camp Hyatt is that all our resorts offer supervised activities for children so that the kids can play with other children and their parents can be on their own," says Halpern.

To further sensitize corporate executives to the needs of hotel guests and remind them of the impact boardroom edicts can have on hotel staffers, Hyatt launched another program called 'In Touch Day." For the past five years, for one day in September, the corporate offices are closed and everyone from the president to mailroom workers is sent to work in a hotel. About 250 people from headquarters are assigned duties ranging from front desk to concierge to bell captains. On one recent "In Touch Day," Hyatt's Hartley-Leonard greeted guests as doorman-for-a-day.