LOST YOUR PHONE CHARGER? IT MAY BE HERE

Good Thing Hotels Don't Charge for Left-Behind Chargers
 
Travelers Forget Them by the Bin Full; One Stash Used in Christmas Decorations

Hotel guests have left all manner of personal items behind in rooms at the Fairmont Hotels & Resorts chain—pillows, false teeth, chocolate-covered ants, a book on how to improve your memory. But nothing compares with mobile-device chargers. The Fairmont Waterfront in Vancouver, British Columbia, has acquired about 300 of them. In California, the Fairmont San Jose is left with about 250 chargers a year. Maids at the Fairmont St. Andrews in Scotland find as many as 35 a month still plugged into wall outlets. "They're easy to miss when you're doing a last-minute scan of the room— and I admit I've left one in a hotel," says Lori Holland, spokeswoman for the Toronto hotel chain. Hotel lost-and-found bins are overflowing with mobile chargers from cell phones, Blackberrys, iPhones and assorted other gizmos. All 45 of the Omni Hotels & Resorts in North America have charger "graveyards," with a typical hotel having two bins full at any time, says Jeff Smith, vice president of operations for the Irving, Texas, chain. At Las Vegas's Main Street Station Casino Hotel last month, manager Joyce Hellebrand brought out five bins containing more than 400 chargers. The chargers, she says, sit with other assorted left-behind items. "You name it, we've found it here—but chargers, they're the king," Ms. Hellebrand says. Why chargers? For starters, they are dark-colored and affixed to out-of-the-way outlets. "You plug it in at night and in the morning you just forget it," says Joe McInerney, chief executive officer of the American Hotel & Lodging Association, who has lost a half dozen chargers himself. The other problem is that so many people carry so many devices that require their own power cords. Road warrior Jeff Block lost so many he invented what he calls the Personal Media Travel Pouch to hold gadgets and chargers. "You have to have a place to keep all this stuff," says Mr. Block, who sells the pouches through a San Francisco company he runs called Kangaroom Storage. Hoteliers say they could alert guests to a left-behind item, but don't for reasons including privacy: A guest may not want his significant other to know about a stay, says David McCurtain, general manager at the Sands Inn & Suites in San Luis Obispo, Calif. "Also, the sheer volume of all lost and found on a daily basis would require too much time and effort," Mr. McCurtain adds. "And these days a lot of reservations come through Expedia, Orbitz, etc., which give us neither address nor phone number." If a guest wants a charger back, hotels will try to ship it. But that didn't ease Janet Schwamm's anxiety after her 16-year-old daughter, Abigail, left her phone charger in a Miami hotel three years ago and had to wait a week and a half for it to be mailed back to the family's home in Short Hills, N.J. "For a kid to be cut off like that is akin to not being able to function," says Ms. Schwamm, a 49-year-old homemaker.At the Groveland Hotel at Yosemite National Park, a guest who left her charger became irate after it subsequently was lost in the mail while being returned to her. The hotel declined to replace the device, saying it wasn't its fault she left it. "She's probably going to put us on TripAdvisor," says Peggy Mosley, the hotel's CEO.
Most people don't bother asking for their chargers back, leaving them to pile up in lost-and-found stashes. "Black spaghetti," is the term housekeepers for Hospitality Management Inc., which owns and operates five hotels in Sacramento, Calif., use to describe the tangled strands of wires in their collections. Hotels are creative in what they do with them. "When guests ask us where they can purchase a new phone charger because they forgot to bring theirs from home, we bring out our box of leftover chargers and let them pick the one that works with their cellphone," says Sandip Jariwala, general manager of the Hawthorn Suites by Wyndham in Alameda, Calif. The Sands in San Luis Obispo goes a step further: It keeps a basket of 12 phone chargers in the breakfast room of the 70-room hotel with a sign that says, "Take one if you need one." The three Loews Corp. hotels in Orlando, Fla., used to try to sell their 1,000 unclaimed chargers they get each year, for $1 each on the after market, "but that has dried up with eBay becoming the cheap place to go for any charger," says Kelly Klatt, security director for the hotels. The Loews Miami Beach Hotel, meanwhile, throws out most of the old chargers but keeps some on hand, in part to prove its honesty. "Sometimes, there is the claim of 'One of your housekeepers stole my charger!' and then we show them the supply of unclaimed chargers and tell them that maybe they just forgot theirs somewhere and 'please feel free to take a replacement,'" says Scott Smith, the hotel's director of security, who adds such guests are then advised: "Do us a favor and not give it back to us." In San Diego, the Tower23 Hotel was able to unload several hundred chargers in 2007 when Red Cross officials were looking for extras during California's massive wildfires that year. The 200 more that have turned up since are used as an informal giveaway program to guests. "My theory is that in everyday life, we keep our cellphones close," says Stacy Long, director of sales and catering at the beachfront hotel. "But when we are on vacation at the beach, sipping on a mojito and watching the sun set, it's a little easier to unplug." Lost chargers can become art. Last year, the Fairmont Waterfront in Vancouver used its stash in Christmas decorating: It used charger cables to string recycled paper snowflakes and the bases to weight coat-hanger-and-paper-roll angels, says the Fairmont's Ms. Holland.