Lost and Lost

I've decided that hotels are truly incompetent at one thing. They can't find anything. I know. I know. A hotel is huge. The things you lose are small. They don't intend on having people whose job is to scour the hotel grounds possibly looking for something when that something can look like trash.

Recently, a visitor came and he was borrowing the card key I have so he could go to the men's room, and then re-enter back without having to knock on the door. Alas, he kept the card by accident, and he did what he thought was the sensible thing. Since he was staying at a hotel, he left the card key in an envelope.

Of course, the hotel, having no mechanism to properly deal with this somehow nearly lost the key in front of their faces. This visitor put the key into a small envelope with his name and my name. By the time I arrived at the front, nearly 6 hours later, a new shift had arrived, and of course, were completely unaware of what was going on.

I figured this was monumental incompetence and that if they simply allowed me to look for it, I would find it. Never trust a staff to look for anything you want. Of course, they thought I was looking for a hotel key, which I told them it was not. Fortunately, they had been opening and closing this desk, and apparently not looking inside it at all, despite the fact there was an envelope with my name and this guy's name on it. They took a simple quick cursory scan, which yielded nothing.

Imagine if they had lost $100 in that drawer. They would, I'm sure, be awfully patient looking around.

I saw the envelope, say my name, and pointed it out. Did they apologize for their mass incompetence? Of course not. They didn't say "How is it possible that I could have missed this? I am truly sorry!". No, not at all. All they think about it is what a great inconvenience it is to do their job. If it takes more than 10 seconds to check it out, it's far too long.

To be fair, this was a crappy hotel. However, I was met with similar help (i.e., none) when I was at the Manchester Hyatt. Of course, their problem is far more daunting. Their hotel grounds are probably ten times as large. However, in this case, I was looking for something that was left with hotel management, something you think they could have dealt with, and yet, nothing was in place to do this.

Lesson? Never lose anything at a hotel. Even if someone puts a big sign with a big arrow pointing at it, the staff will manage not to spot it.