The Closet Full of Unclaimed Chargers: Why Hotels Lose 12 Staff Hours Per Week on Lost and Found

The housekeeping storage room at a 65-room hotel in Charleston had a system. That system was a plastic bin labeled “LOST AND FOUND” in black marker. Inside the bin — and on the shelf above it, and on the floor next to it — were approximately 340 items accumulated over eight months. Forty-seven phone chargers. Nineteen items of clothing. Three pairs of prescription glasses. A laptop bag containing a laptop that had been there for four months. Two passports. A child’s stuffed animal that, judging by its condition, had been someone’s most important possession.

The front desk manager had a spiral notebook where she logged items when she remembered to. About 60% of found items made it into the notebook. Of those, about 30% had a guest name attached. Of those, roughly half had been contacted. The overall rate of items successfully returned to guests: somewhere around 8%.

The laptop alone was worth more than the cost of implementing a proper system. The passports represented a government document handling obligation the hotel was not meeting. And the stuffed animal — well, that represented the kind of moment that makes or breaks a guest’s memory of your property. Somewhere, a child was still asking about it.

The Scale of the Problem

Lost and found seems like a minor operational issue. It is not glamorous. It does not appear on strategic planning agendas. No hotel owner has ever said, “Our competitive advantage is lost and found management.” And yet the volume of items, the staff time consumed, the liability exposure for high-value items, and the guest satisfaction impact make it one of the highest-return operational improvements an independent hotel can make.

The math is straightforward. A 75-room hotel at 82% occupancy processes roughly 22,448 room-nights per year. Studies suggest that guests leave items behind in approximately 0.5-0.8% of stays. That translates to 112-180 found items per year — roughly 2-3 per week. Each item requires someone to log it, attempt to identify the guest, store it, follow up, and eventually dispose of it or return it.

Without a system, each item consumes 15-25 minutes of staff time across its lifecycle — not all at once, but in fragments: the housekeeper who finds it and brings it to the desk, the front desk agent who writes it in the notebook, the manager who tries to look up the guest contact, the follow-up call or email, the packaging and shipping if the guest wants it back. Multiply 20 minutes average by 150 items per year, and you get 50 hours of annual staff time on lost and found alone — more than a full work week.

Why Guests Do Not Call

The conventional assumption is that if a guest leaves something valuable behind, they will call the hotel. This assumption is wrong more often than most hoteliers realize.

They do not know where they lost it. A guest who visited three hotels, two restaurants, and an airport lounge on a four-city business trip is not certain which hotel has their phone charger. Calling all four properties feels like too much effort for a $25 item.

They assume it is gone. Many guests assume housekeeping discarded the item or that it was taken by the next guest. This assumption is reinforced by the common experience of calling a hotel about a lost item and being put on hold while someone rummages through an unmarked bin with no organized inventory.

They forget. By the time a guest realizes an item is missing — often days after checkout — the urgency has faded. They buy a replacement. The missing item becomes a mild annoyance rather than a reason to call a hotel in another city.

They do not want to pay shipping. For items worth less than $50, the cost and hassle of arranging shipping often exceeds the replacement cost. Guests do a mental calculation and decide it is not worth the effort.

This is why proactive guest notification changes the equation entirely. When the hotel contacts the guest — “We found your item, would you like it back?” — the recovery dynamic reverses. The guest does not need to remember, does not need to guess which hotel, and does not need to initiate a process. They simply reply to an email.

Hotels that proactively notify guests about found items achieve recovery rates of 45-55%, compared to 8-15% for hotels that wait for guests to inquire. That fivefold improvement in recovery rate translates directly into guest goodwill, positive review mentions, and repeat bookings.

The Review Impact You Can Measure

Lost and found is one of the few operational processes where doing it well generates positive reviews rather than just preventing negative ones. When a hotel proactively contacts a guest about a left-behind item and successfully returns it, the guest experience is not neutral — it is actively positive. The guest feels cared for. They tell the story to colleagues and family. And a measurable percentage leave reviews that specifically mention the experience.

ReviewPro data shows that hotels with proactive lost and found notification see an average 0.4-point improvement in guest satisfaction scores related to staff service. On platforms where star ratings influence booking decisions, this translates to measurable revenue impact.

The reverse is equally true. Guests who call about a lost item and encounter staff who cannot locate it, do not have a record of it, or tell them “we throw everything away after a week” leave reviews that mention the experience. These reviews are disproportionately negative and detailed, because the guest feels that the hotel did not care enough to maintain a basic system.

The Annual Calculation for a 75-Room Hotel

At 150 found items per year with manual processes: staff time at 20 minutes per item across the lifecycle comes to 50 hours, or roughly $1,250 at front desk labor rates. Guest notification attempts that actually reach the guest (15% success rate): 23 items returned, 127 items accumulating in storage. Periodic cleanout effort: 4-6 hours quarterly, another $400-$600 per year. High-value item liability exposure (inadequate logging of electronics, jewelry, documents): unquantifiable but real.

With automated tracking: staff time drops to 5-7 minutes per item (email the report, system handles the rest) — 17 hours per year, saving 33 hours. Guest notification reaches 90%+ of identifiable guests. Recovery rate increases to 45-55%, meaning 68-83 items returned to guests. Each successful return generates measurable goodwill and review improvement.

The cost difference is not just operational efficiency — it is the difference between a hotel that loses track of guests’ belongings and a hotel that makes guests feel taken care of even after they have left. In an industry where the next booking decision is influenced by the last review, that difference compounds faster than most hoteliers realize.