[dhalliday]

I am rather concerned about Delta's new system for dealing with lost items.

This is a real shame because I used to believe that Delta had the best customer service of any of the legacy major carriers. However, since I left my computer in a seat-back pocket last week, I am reconsidering this view.
Last Thursday I left my laptop in the seatback pocket of my flight from JFK to JAX. This was the last flight of the day, so it should have been a simple process of matching the missing laptop to my name and then sending me an email about it.

Instead, as I try to navigate Delta's lost and found system to find my computer, I find that Delta has become almost a parody of the “faceless corporation.” There is no phone number for support. No email address. It’s just an online form that you fill out and then pray that someone reads your request.

It appears to me that no one in the system has any incentive to return items. Instead, Delta ships the items to a private contractor in Scottsboro, Alabama who is “supposed” to try to find the owners. Of course, this contractor isn’t incentivized to do this because when then can’t “find” the owner, Delta sells them the item at a huge discount. Then, they can turn around and sell it a huge markup.

That is, of course, if a flight attendant or maintenance crew member hasn’t stolen the item before it gets into the system. Honestly, I can't find a single place in this system where anyone has an incentive to report the item and attempt to get it to the rightful owners. As long as the rightful owners aren’t found, someone gets to make a lot of money…

Indeed, your current system strikes me as “asking the cat to babysit the parakeet.”

In the next week or so, I’ll be writing an article about how exactly the Delta lost item “sausage” is made and send it off to my twitter, facebook, linkedin accounts, my HuffPo blog and my university alumni email lists.

While I recognize that my article won’t exactly be breaking news—a number of people have already commented on your lost item policy—I do know that it will make me feel better about dealing with what I see as a de-humanizing and needlessly painful lost-and-found system.