Originally Posted by
hhoope01
What if they had a simple policy of contacting the customer if possible in these situations and left it up to the customer to decide if the property was valuable or not? Personally, I see a difference between something scribbled on a napkin and a set of headphones.
My guess is that the issue is less one of legality and one of effort. I don't know how often customers leave items behind, but I would suspect that it may tend to happen more than we think. As such, at a large hotel it could end up being someone full time job to do nothing but look up customer contact info and try to contact them when something is found. It is just easier and less costly to wait and let the customer contact the hotel should the item(s) be valuable enough.
True. I initially thought they could set up some kind of Macro or Script to automatically send an email out to a customer who may have left something in a room - all it would take would be the touch of a button from a housekeeper or front-desk agent. And it could be that easy. But then how do you decide what is valuable? That requires judgment calls, and my guess is that a large corporation like Marriott wants to avoid having their housekeepers make those calls.
I agree with you - it ultimately boils down to not wanting to exert more effort, which is a shame.