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Lost-and-Found Item Reunion

Example prompt: "When housekeeping adds a row to our 'Lost & Found' Google Sheet with a photo of an item, look up the most recent guest in that room, draft a Gmail offering them collection on a future stay or postage at cost, and post a one-liner in #front-desk on Slack so the host can sense-check before sending."

The Problem

A guest leaves a book, a phone charger, a child's teddy, or a coat on the back of a chair. The housekeeper finds it on the turn-around and puts it in a drawer behind reception with a sticky note that says 'Room 3, Tuesday'. Two weeks later the guest writes from a different time zone, the sticky note has fallen off, and reception spends fifteen minutes establishing whose teddy it is. The conversation about postage cost happens five times before the host loses patience and either eats the cost or sends a thirty-pound parcel to the wrong address.

How GloriaMundo Solves It

We use the housekeeper's existing Lost & Found row as the trigger and do the matching, the drafting, and the tracking around it. A code step (or a sheet read with the right ORDER BY) finds the most recent checked-out booking for the room. An LLM step writes a short, honest Gmail to the guest with the photo and two options — collection on a future stay, or postage at cost with the cost quoted only once we know the destination. The draft sits in Gmail for the host to read; nothing about a guest's personal property goes out automatically. Replies are classified into three states — collect, post, not mine — each with their own follow-up. The log holds every item from found-date to leaving the property, and a thirty-day reminder catches the ones that never replied. Glass Box preview shows the matched booking and the drafted email before anything goes into a draft folder.

Example Workflow Steps

  1. Trigger (event): A new row in the 'Lost & Found' tab of the property Google Sheet.
  2. Step 1 (integration): Read the 'Bookings' tab for the matching room's most recent booking where departure_date is on or before date_found.
  3. Step 2 (llm): Draft a short, sincere Gmail to the guest with the photo, the room, the item, and the two options (collect on next stay, or post at cost with quote-after-address); save as a Gmail draft.
  4. Step 3 (integration): Append a row to 'Lost & Found Log' with the match, the draft link, and status 'Draft'.
  5. Step 4 (integration): Post a one-liner in #front-desk on Slack with the room, the item, the matched guest, and the draft link.
  6. Step 5 (llm + conditional, reply-watch): When the guest replies, classify as 'collect', 'post', or 'not mine'; draft the corresponding follow-up Gmail and update the log row to 'Awaiting address', 'Held for collection — [location]', or 'Unclaimed'.
  7. Step 6 (schedule): After thirty days with no reply, draft a single polite follow-up Gmail and update the row to 'Reminder drafted'; after sixty days, mark 'Unclaimed' and add to the quarterly hand-off list.

Integrations Used

  • Google Sheets — the housekeeper's Lost & Found tab as the trigger source, the Bookings tab for the match, and the Log tab for tracking
  • Gmail — the initial draft, the follow-up drafts on reply, and the thirty-day reminder, all saved as drafts for the host to send
  • Slack — the front-desk channel so the host sees what is in the drawer without rummaging through it

Who This Is For

Hosts and reception teams at B&Bs, small hotels, and short-let portfolios who hold a small standing inventory of items a guest has left behind and currently track them on a sticky note or a one-line entry in a notebook. The workflow keeps the inventory accurate and turns the awkward 'is this your charger?' email into a sincere two-paragraph note with a photo attached.

Time & Cost Saved

The matching takes ten to fifteen minutes by hand for the room with two bookings on the same day, and the email itself takes five minutes when the host has time. With one or two items found a week at a small property, the workflow saves an hour a month directly. The bigger gain is the items that currently sit in the drawer for months because nobody had time to write the email — they leave the property, the storage space stays small, and the quarterly charity hand-off has the items it should have rather than a year's worth of forgotten paperbacks.