Lost & Found System needs Serious Management Attention

[redleg98]

Dear Southwest Management, 

I left my laptop on a flight, which is completely my fault. I filed a lost and found report on the website with relevant details, which generated a reference #. It has been 7 days with no feedback or no way to call or interact with a system tracker on the web. Southwest is an amazing airline with great employees and culture. That said, I am woefully disappointed in their "lost & found" process, IT systems, and complete lack of customer feedback! For me, if I were Southwest upper management, I would take my feedback and others to initiate a continuous improvement process for a system status check on a lost item, incorporate customer representative / phone feedback, or an auto daily email that goes to customers reporting the status of a lost item. I guarantee the IT infrastructure has the ability with scanning technology to automate a process very cheaply and generate auto email statuses from an existing software platform. It is so frustrating not knowing the status of my laptop. It might not be important to an airline, but it is very important to customers. 

Thanks,

Ken 

[TheMiddleSeat]

First, this is a customer to customer forum.  If you really want to share your thoughts with Southwest use the contact us link at the bottom of the page and send a message.  Second, Southwest is an airline, not a lost and found company.  In fact, I'm pretty sure the lost and found function is outsourced to another company.  All items are sent to a centralized processing center and dealt with from there.  It takes time, but if you provided enough unique identifying information about your item then there is a chance it will be returned to you.  It is also possible the item never made it into the system and another traveler decided to take it home with them.  If I were in upper management I would invest the money you want to invest into lost and found management into other items directly related to the core business of flying airplanes or offer cheaper flights.  Good luck getting your laptop back, you will need to be patient.

--TheMiddleSeat

[dfwskier]

Keeping up with passengers losing things is no small task.

If just 1 in every 1,000 people loses something, that means that SW has to try to find 160,000

items. Of course it could implement tons (expensive) of things to keep passengers up to speed every minute of every day, and have a dedicated number thousands of people would be calling (that would have to be staffed by lots of employees) but that would increase ticket prices for those 999 out of 1000 that do not lose things.

Southwest tells people it can take up to 30 days to locate lost items, All found items go to a central location where they are entered into a data base. All item reported lost go into the data base. Then an attempt to match the two is made. 

Make sure you included a serial number with your lost item report. That is the best way of upping your chance of getting your item back.