Your Guest Left Something Valuable Behind And They Need It! (What To Do)

if there's one thing my team and I have learned managing tens of thousands of guests is that one day some of your guests will leave something at your property that is a fact that is a guarantee and so this week I want to talk about how you should handle items that your guest leave behind welcome to short-term rental riches we'll discuss investing in real estate but with a specific focus on short-term rentals quick actionable items to acquire manage and scale your portfolio I'm your host Tim

Hub welcome back to the short-term rental riches podcast really Happ you're here again uh I'm happy to be home in Brazil or at least where home is for half of the year as most of you know I moved out of the US quite a long time ago I do spend a lot of time in Columbia and I spent a lot of time here but I was traveling around and it just feels really good to get back and get settled in and to revisit some of the

things that I really enjoyed about Brazil or some of the things like tennis and going to the beach and all these fun things so um on my way back or actually one of the flights right before coming back I was reading my iPad which I do I love my little iPad Mini it's the only Apple product I have actually I use an Android for my phone Google Google phone Google pixel because it works in the whole world with their service which is great uh I'm sure

there's a lot of other options out there now but that's why I switched over back in the day but I still have an Apple product and it's my iPad mini and I love it because it's not connected to work in any way it's the one device the one electronic device that I have that isn't connected to email it's not connected to Whatsapp or a phone none of that I don't get any message any notifications on there and I use it just to learn and study and

journal and read and review my goals things like that so I love it so uh I was reading on the plane and then I got off the plane and I went to get my actually I was on the next flight headed out and I went to reach for that beautiful little iPad mini and realized I left it in the seat pocket of the flight before so yes our guests are leaving items behind our short-term rentals guests and travelers leave stuff all the time and I was

really fortunate this story has a happy ending I got that iPad back before leaving the country so I actually went to a hotel and I was there for a couple days and the airline I think this was Delta Airlines managed to ship that iPad to the hotel which accepted it and I got it just before leaving so a good ending to a moment of panic so some of our guests they leave really valuable items in our properties right and not all the items that they're leaving

are items that they're going to want back right we get phone chargers all the time left that's probably the number one thing sometimes people leave clothes sometimes people leave all sorts of little things we know they leave food and stuff like that but obviously those aren't things that they're coming back for uh we've had guests leave some pretty valuable stuff um phones watches all kinds of things and so we have a way for handling that and I want to tune you in to the way we

do it but before we get into that I want you just to ask yourself no matter where you are in your short-term Journey uh if you're just getting started or if you have lots of properties this is something that's going to happen so you've got to ask yourself how you're going to handle it and assuming that you're not doing the housekeeping for your short-term rental your housekeepers are going to be the ones to find these products so really it's a conversation that you need to have

with your housekeeping team before you start if you work with a company getting those items back to the guest it's probably going to be a little more challenging if they have 3 5 10 20 housekeepers then shipping items back is probably not something that they're going to be super excited to do right so you got to make sure that you talk with whoever is actually doing your housekeeping of course if you just are getting started you have one property that is a lot easier to do

but there's still quite a few things that we need to think about so the first step here step number one is that you need to have a description of how you handle this in your house rules so in our house rules or your rental agreement because items will get left behind that is a fact so in our rental agreement we have an item in there that says if an item is Left Behind we'd be happy to ship it back to you but please note it could

take up to a week before we mail it uh there is a $50 charge uh plus shipping and so obviously the charges you guys decide whatever works for you and a lot of times that might just be the charge that you're passing right on to the actual person that's doing it right so if your housekeeper is willing to ship these items back for you then that could be a fee that you're passing back to them so that's the first thing we want to just have that

disclosed so if they ask about it they already signed our rental agreement they saw our house rules and we already had that laid out for them so we need to communicate with the guest hey we found your SE so uh we'd be happy to ship it back for you but please note it's going to take x amount of time and we do have a charge since we have to pay one of our team members to go and do all the shipping and all those types of

things would you like us to send it back to you A lot of times if it's something not super valuable uh really if it's something less valuable than the charge you're charging most of the time they're going to say uh don't worry about it um no big deal but for those times where it is something valuable like my little iPad Mini they're definitely going to want you to ship it back and so the first step is holding onto that item in a secure place until someone

is able to ship it and so if again if you're just getting started you have one property or if you have a really good uh relationship with your housekeeper and they're happy to go ship it off the same day that's that's the best case scenario right we want to get it back to the guest as soon as possible had Delta Airlines got my iPad mini back to the hotel one day or 2 days later I would have never got it I mean I would have or

it would have been stuck in storage somewhere for months cuz I'm not going back to the US for quite a while so I was really grateful for that and remember we're in the hospitality industry so we want to do everything we can to make sure that our guests have a great experience before during and after their stay and so this is the after the stay part uh and this will if they're ever back in the area they're going to remember this believe me and they will

look to book your property first so the first step we need to make sure we have our process disclosed we need to communicate this with the guest we need to store that item in a safe place if we're not able to ship it that same day so a lot of our properties we just have a locked storage uh and that could be a good spot or if you have a really good relationship with your housekeeper they can hold on to it for you uh the place

where it might get a little iffy is if you're working with a housekeeping company that has a lot of housekeepers maybe there's new house Keepers going in you don't have security cameras on your storage and stuff like that you don't really want to be responsible for that guess item but you do want to have that disclose that if something unfortunately happens you guys are not responsible for those items left over right so you want to make sure that it's stored in a place that's safe until

the day until the moment where you can ship that item back uh then you're going to want to figure out how much the shipping actually costs and shipping can range a whole lot of course if you're trying to ship something internationally that could get exorb expensive we actually do not ship anything internationally especially electronics and I've learned that one the hard way a long time ago when I was living in Colombia I ordered a new phone and my mom sent it down across the border but

you know what it never actually showed up you have custom fees you have all those types of things uh extra taxes and so fortunately there's not really an easy way to ship things internationally um but for all of these domestic type things it's pretty easy to get a shipping estimate you can go on ups.com or FedEx uh or DHL and look up a shipping estimate if you happen to know the weight and the sort of package size a lot of our properties are near Postal Centers

right so the most sure way is just to go there uh figure out that charge and communicate that with your guest we will charge Our Guest the estimate first so we will do that via stripe and and most of you if you've been in the industry for a while and if you're on other platforms where you're taking credit card payments you probably have stripe set up already so we'll get that charge first and we'll also get the charge for handling before we go ship that item

if there happens to be a big difference in the postage if it's really big for whatever reason we just totally over underestimated we might charge the guess but most of the time we're not going to uh cover that tiny little difference right when you're shipping the items always a good idea to get a tracking number and that's one thing that you can send over to the guests especially if this is a valuable item sometimes it's a little jewelry piece or something that a grandmother gave to

them or the husband or the wife left or something like that and they want to know when it's arriving right so um you can get a tracking number communicate that over and then hopefully that guest will receive that item soon and you will make their day and they will book with you again in the future so remember with our short-term rentals the goal is to give our guests the best experience possible before during and after our stay and this is something that hands Downs going to

come up if it hasn't happened yet you want to make sure you have that process in place so you can make your guest happy even after they've stayed with you just like when I got my little iPad Mini back from Delta Airlines thank you Delta Airlines you saved the day so if you didn't have a process in place already I hope these few little tips helped you and you can put that little process in place and until next time I hope you have a fabulous week

want to get on the fast track to Financial Freedom through short-term rentals well it all starts with the properties you acquire but you want to make sure that you acquire the right properties I want to give you my ebook that will show you how to do just that there is no charge it's my gift to you for being one of our subscribers just go to rest methods.com that's r s methods.com