HOW DIGITAL LOST AND FOUND TOOLS EMPOWER HOTEL GUESTS?

There's nothing worse than losing a valuable item while on the road. On average, every day more than 8 million people fly to different cities and countries. According to a record, 75 million visitors from around the world traveled to the United States last year. More travelers mean more hotel rooms are occupied.

We all know that a hotel isn’t a place just for the guests, the hoteliers also welcome the personal items and gadgets of their customers. In every big or small hotel, there is a chance of items to get lost. Recovering misplaced items can make a trip great again.

Every hotel management works hard to make a guest's experience memorable but most of the time, it gets difficult to satisfy a guest maybe when any valuable item goes missing. The customer will get frustrated, and even panic while searching for their item. In such cases, it is difficult to handle the guest. Hopefully, the only way to get back the item is to immediately contact the lost and found department.

Every hotel wants to make their guest happy by recovering that lost item, therefore, the return process must be easy. Over 46 million items are lost each year in US hotels alone and to serve the hotels with amazing technology, Chargerback was introduced. The software supports every facet of the lost and found process from start to finish making the return process easy for your staff and customers.  

We all know that how a lost and found service typically works. The customer comes and tries to find the lost item in a huge box and if he finds it the procedure ends, but if the customer is settled abroad then he calls the hotel and asks for their lost item, after searching the item it is difficult to say that the particular item actually belongs to that customer and generally only 1/3 of your customers get their items back. 

With Chargerback, you have a better way to manage lost and found. The whole process works in two simple steps.

• Consumers report their lost items, and businesses record their found items.
• Items are Matched and Returned.

Hotel operators such as Holiday Inn Club Vacations’ have switched the old lost and found practices with the new digital methodology by the use of lost-and-found software by Chargerback.

Betsy Lemus, Manager, Brand Performance at Holiday Inn Club Vacations, favors digital systems like these because they put the duty of retrieving lost items on the guest, not the hotel.

“Guests put in the information on their lost item, and can even provide pictures of the item, which helps us locate it,” Lemus said. “We note the service on our hotels’ welcome packets, and we do everything through email so there is an information trail to follow.”

Al Zaccario, VP of information Technology at New Castle Hotels & Resorts, said “in the past lost-and-found requests often were logged by one employee, then followed up on by another. This process can introduce errors and confusion, leading to misplaced records and unsatisfied guests.”

“If you are able to log a request online so that everyone can see the guest has this need, and you are able to use different assets to recover items quickly, that makes everything so much easier,” Zaccario said. “The takeaway is that it’s a program, not a process. That's what makes it effective.”

Final Words

Meeting guests with lost items gives hotels with more than just good will and these experiences can turn into valuable positive review scores. Soon we will be seeing the ChargerBack software in the hotels, and the guest can finally enter the hotel without worrying for their valuable goods.