Han Ximin

ximhan@126.com

RIDE-HAILING giant Didi Chuxing has come up with three ways for riders to get back possessions left behind during the ride via the Lost and Found service launched on its app.

This new feature will be put into service in more than 300 cities nationwide. It allows passengers, who have lost their items out of negligence, to negotiate with the driver about how to get their belongings back.

Riders can ask the driver to drive their stuff back, or drop the belongings at a nearby police station or send them back via express delivery.

If the driver returns the lost items by driving, the rider will need to pay the fees in advance through the app, though the platform will not charge any fee from it, the company said in a release Tuesday.

In the first half of the year, Didi drivers had found and reported 850,000 items left by passengers during their rides. In June alone, 199,464 lost items were reported, or 6,649 items per day.

In addition, a Lost and Found team, comprising of over 500 Didi employees, were tasked to find the lost items for users. In the first half of the year, 65.2 percent of the belongings had been recovered.

Data show items are most likely to be retrieved within the first 30 minutes after passengers are dropped off. The new feature will be helpful to riders to get back their lost items promptly and reduce the amount of communication between passengers and drivers.

When the service was piloted in Chengdu in 2019, the reports of lost items in the city dropped by 20 percent and complaints over handing back lost items also dropped by 47 percent.