Building it
In March 2026, I started building a way for MGM guests to request their stored luggage from a tablet in the hotel lobby. We were under a tight deadline and needed to get it running on the tablets quickly.
The mobile bellman app ran as an installable web app, but I couldn’t take the same approach here. The luggage tablet needed sensitive environment variables to communicate with the API, which ruled out deploying it as a public web app.
I used Capacitor to package the React app as an Android app, then distributed it privately through Microsoft Intune to organization-managed tablets locked to a single application.
Making it work in a lobby
I built the screens for looking up stored luggage and requesting pickup. The request had to carry the information the bell desk needed to find the right bags, including the bag count and storage location.
A lobby tablet gets used by one guest after another. I added an idle timeout that resets the session, so the next guest starts fresh instead of picking up where someone else left off.
I also added a staff admin screen for choosing the hotel. That meant we could configure the same build for different properties on-site, rather than making a separate version for each hotel.
Learning from the pilot
The production pilot processed over 4,000 luggage-tag submissions in its first five weeks.
I added session recordings so support could find a problem using the guest’s luggage tag and see what happened on the tablet. Working with product, I removed first names, rewards tiers and comments from the recorded requests, while retaining the last name and tag needed for troubleshooting.
The recordings showed that about 15% of sessions hit a last-name mismatch. That gave us a specific problem to work on next: helping guests get past the luggage lookup so they could finish requesting their bags.