A box of coats and a phone call about a phone
The office has a lost property box: a denim jacket, three school jumpers, an umbrella, a pair of glasses and a phone found under a seat by the cleaner on Tuesday. On Thursday, a woman rings. She was on a coach on Saturday, going to a wedding, and she thinks she left her phone. She does not know the coach number or the driver.
The office checks the box. There is a phone, but it was found on Tuesday, and nobody wrote down which coach it came from. The coach she was on did three jobs since Saturday. Is it her phone? Nobody can say without asking her to describe it, which leads to a conversation about phone cases.
Items are found without their context
The difficulty is not storing lost property but knowing where it came from. Coaches do several hires a day, and items are found by the driver at the end of a job, the cleaner that evening or the next driver the following morning.
- Items go into a box with no note of which coach or when they were found.
- The coach's hires that day are not linked to the find.
- The office does not contact organisers, so owners have to know to ring.
- Enquiries arrive days later and cannot be matched quickly.
- Valuable items and documents are stored with everything else.
How you store valuables and what you do with unclaimed items are for your own policy. We deal with the record and the matching.
A lot of calls and a poor impression
Each lost property enquiry takes time: checking the box, working out which coach it might have been, describing items. Customers who lose something valuable remember how easy or hard it was to get back. School trips are a steady source of lost property, and schools notice whether jumpers and bags come back.
Unclaimed items pile up, and eventually someone has to decide what to do with a box of coats nobody can identify.
A lost property log linked to the hires
We build a simple lost property log.
- Whoever finds an item (driver, cleaner, next driver) logs it on their phone: vehicle, where on the coach, a photo and a short description. It takes less than a minute.
- The log links the find to the hires that vehicle did since it was last cleaned, from your bookings, so the likely hire is shown.
- The office sees new finds each morning and can contact the organiser of the likely hire with the photo, for example the school trip leader or the wedding contact.
- When someone rings or uses a lost property form on your website, they give the date and the event. The log shows items found after that hire, with photos, so a match is quick.
- Valuable items and documents are flagged for secure storage and prompt follow-up.
- Returns are recorded (collected, posted, handed to the school) and unclaimed items are listed after the period your policy sets.
| Step | Before | With the log |
|---|---|---|
| Item found | Put in a box | Logged with photo, vehicle and position |
| Which hire | Unknown | Linked to the vehicle's hires |
| Contacting the owner | Wait for a call | Organiser told with a photo |
| Matching an enquiry | Rummage and describe | Items for that hire shown with photos |
| Unclaimed items | Box grows | Listed after your set period |
The same phone, logged
The cleaner finds the phone on Tuesday evening and logs it with a photo. The log shows the coach did a wedding on Saturday, a school trip on Monday and a works outing on Tuesday, and the cleaning record says it was last cleaned on Saturday morning. The office emails the three organisers with the photo on Wednesday morning. The wedding contact replies that it belongs to a guest, who collects it that afternoon.
School jumpers found after a trip go back to the school in a bag with the trip leader's name on it, logged as returned.
Is lost property a box in the office?
- Found items go into a box with no record of which coach.
- Owners have to know to ring you.
- Matching enquiries takes several phone calls.
- Valuable items are stored with everything else.
- Unclaimed items pile up with no plan.