And I disagree. I do think the hotel should make an effort to contact the guest. This is definitely a case of 'others views may vary'/differing opinions. Both sides have merit.

BTW - it goes w/o saying that a hotel, restaurant, car rental, department store, can't be held responsible for what someone does in their personal life.

Glad the OP managed to get his stuff back.

Cheers.

When I worked desk at Marriott, we were told we could not call guests or contact them about lost items, for privacy reasons.

There have been instances where long ago calls were made to the number on reservation and a wife answered and had no clue the husband had stayed in a hotel that night for example so turn up the marital turbulence and the hotel staff gets caught in the middle of the proceedings.

So we were told to stay out of it, just turn into lost and found log the item and if guest called then we coudl deal with it. We wera always really good about logging and safekeeping the lost items.

We kept lost items for 3 months I think then donated to local shelters of the housekeeper who located the item if they requested. Valuable items were kept in a safe.

Slightly off topic, but it's a good story:

Many years ago I arrived in Fargo ND on Braniff FC to visit a girlfriend and dropped my passport wallet beside a car in the parking lot. It had US$5000 in cash, my passport, several credit cards and about Bahraini Dinars 1000 and some other money. It had my address book also.

A few hours after I arrived at my friend's house her telephone rang. "Is somebody named jbcarioca there?" She said yes, and the airport manager told me a typical North Dakotan had seen the wallet and turned it in. The airport manager went through the address book until he found a Fargo name and number and called.

Every single thing was intact.

Nobody ever can say a bad thing about Fargo to me. I will not hear it!!

As for protecting people doing things illegal/immoral/shady, too bad for them. They shouldn't be leading double lives or whatever, and if it wasn't a forgotten item at a hotel that tripped them up it would be something else equally silly. I hate the fact that 99% of us have to be inconvenienced to protect the 1% of people doing stuff they're not supposed to be doing anyway.

But what really burns me up is when I do call a hotel where I know I've left an item and I get the lost-and-found runaround like a previous poster said. I've never left anything irreplaceable or hugely valuable (thank goodness), but just stuff like a book I was in the middle of or a set of pajamas. I can't imagine housekeepers stealing that kind of stuff, so they must just be throwing it away, then counting on the piss-poor lost-and-found process to discourage guests from pursuing it too far.

With over 200 nights in Marriotts least year, I have five times left something in my hotel room: 1) a phone charger at a Fairfield Inn in Denver, 2) another phone charger in ???, 3) a set of very nice headphones in a Full-Service in Pueblo, CO, 4) a set of push-up bars in a Courtyard in Ft. Meyers, and 5) some nutritional supplements in a Full-Service in Albuquerque.

Resolutions for each: 1) I checked back in to the hotel the following week and they didn't have my charger, but a very similar one that someone else had left behind and they gave that one to me; 2)Never bothered; 3) I called back less than a week after departure and they didn't have them - I pleaded my case that I know I left them there and that the housekeeper must have taken them (they were sitting out in plain site - the housekeeper surely couldn't have overlooked them, even though I did at 4a trying to catch a plane out of DEN). Of the numerous times I called, I had one front-desk agent let me know that the hotel could file an insurance claim and then they could reimburse me, but that turned out to not be true. I was upset with both the hotel housekeeper for stealing my property, and with myself for leaving it behind.; 4) I contacted the hotel a couple weeks after departure and they FedEx'd my push-ups bars back to me next day at their own cost - I thought that very kind. (It's a corporate property - I wonder if that has anything to do with it). 5) I do want my supplements back, but I've never taken the time to call and request them - I don't want them back enough, I suppose. (And in the time it took me to write this, I probably could have called them - hmmm...)

I'd like it if they called me to ask about property I left behind, but where would they draw the line as to what they'll call you about? What if I left an address I wrote on a napkin? Or a folder filled with scribblings? Or some $10 sunglasses that I bought because I left my good ones at home? Or... You know what I mean? I think it's less about protecting sneaky behavior and more about avoiding the dilemma of having to decide what is valuable and what isn't. What if they did have a policy of contacting customers for abandoned property, and you left something behind, the housekeeper thought it wasn't valuable and then threw it away. There might be legal precedence for action against the hotel, right?

I wish they'd contact me, but I wouldn't expect them to.

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.

I left some sunglasses at a Seattle area CY once (I don't recall the name right now). I realized it after I passed security at SEA, where I was dropped off by the hotel shuttle. The property mailed me my sunglasses at their cost. I was impressed with that, although I haven't stayed with them since I have rented a car with recent stays. FWIW, this property runs a shuttle for about 3 miles around the property. They don't have free breakfast, but it is a good property for a short stay when you don't want to rent a car (since the hotel shuttle lets you reach a nearby mall that has a movie theatre and multiple restaurants). A B&N is within walking distance.

I cleaned out my purse at a hotel and left a bunch of garbage receipts on the desk when i checked out. The hotel mailed them to me, unrequested... I thought it was funny... Now I put any garbage in the trash can.

Perhaps it was a not so subtle hint...

+1 here with a twist. I am not the morals police nor pretend to know or tell anyone else what is right and wrong. But if YOUR stay at a hotel could potentially cause YOU grief or embarrassment, YOU should take precautions so MARRIOTT and I are not caught in the middle. Again, it seems that a lot of work go into documenting and saving lost property without the proper resolution. Sort of like a pilot flying 5 hours across the USA then refusing to land the plane.

FWIW, I stayed a week at a high-end non-Marriott in downtown Boston about 10 years ago paying $250+ nightly for a closet of a room. I was deep into studying for a pilot's license (as a hobby) at the time and left behind a huge, thick paperback text book with years of notes, highlighting and other notations contained within.

I realized I left it behind by 11 am and still being in town working, called to see if I could pick it up on my way to the airport in the afternoon. I did reach a very sympathetic Director of Housekeeper who investigated but told me the cleaner had already tossed it into the incinerator! She sent me a check for $50 to replace it but damage was far greater...

I once left a ring (a cheap one at that) at the Waikiki Marriott. They called me and asked if they could mail it back to me. My flight got delayed and I was being put up in the Hilton Hawaiian Village and they brought it to me. I sent the manager a nice thank you letter. This was above and beyond.

Another post prompted me to this thought.

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/marri...fore-stay.html

Its very common to send notices (some times multiple reminders) in advance of an upcoming visit / reservation yet no one is screaming "my privacy is being compromised" in case the stay is "clandestine".

So what is the difference? Why can't the same system be used to discreetly ask if perhaps "something" has been left behind?

Ten years ago, I lost a pilot's flight logbook after a trip to renew my pilot's license. Real important legal stuff and memories that took years to re-create. I ripped my house apart looking for it and assumed it was in a pocket of luggage which my wife threw out shortly afterward, which she vehemently denies. I stayed at this hotel frequently and it never occurred to me then to call and ask if they had found it, before this thread appeared.

In this case, somewhere one has put their email address into the reservation, profile etc. and by doing so accepted the leagalese that allows them to contact via email. probably no one ever reads the terms and conditions, but did allow email communications.

I disagree with you CJ. If I leave something somewhere, I often don't know where I left it (not something I would have done on purpose), and furthermore, there may be some elapsed time before I realize I'm missing the item. It's not possible for me to contact the hotel until I realize the item is missing and figure out I may have left it there. Once I left a phone in my room, but I thought at first it must have been somewhere else, when I called the hotel I was thinking it was a long shot to do so (I thought surely they would have notified me of something that important - or at least asked if I was missing something), fortunately they had indeed found it.

Maybe a safe policy is, if something is found in the room, to notify one by their email on record - after all, as mentioned above, one gets messages about their upcoming stay to the same email.