Travelers Forget Everything From Passports to False Teeth

Nov. 12, 2011— -- Frequent business traveler Joyce Gioia forgot more than $20,000 worth of jewelry in her hotel room in Italy last year.

Luckily for Gioia, the jewelry was in a room safe, and staff at the Rome Marriott Grand Hotel Flora shipped the items to her home in Austin.

"I had done such a dumb thing, and I was very happy to get the jewelry back," says Gioia, a management consultant.

Travelers annually leave millions of personally important items such as wallets, keys, cellphones and eyeglasses behind in hotels, airports, airplanes and rental cars. Fortunately for the forgetful, many belongings — including very valuable and unusual ones such as Gioia's jewelry — are returned.

Many, however, aren't, and they are given away or sold if their owners don't retrieve them or their owners cannot be found.

Gioia and other travelers scold themselves for their forgetfulness, but psychologists say it's commonplace even among the most veteran of travelers.

"When traveling, people tend to have lots on their minds, and there are often many unexpected distractions," says David Meyer, a University of Michigan psychology professor. "The combination of too much to keep track of, limited attention for doing so and being in relatively unusual circumstances outside familiar work and home locations promote forgetting about the small stuff being carried along the way."

USA TODAY contacted several airlines, airports, hotels and car-rental companies and, among other things, asked how many items are left behind by their customers yearly.

Southwest Airlines, which carried 88 million passengers last year, reported the largest number. The airline takes possession of up to 10,000 items a month that are left behind at airports and in planes, says spokeswoman Katie McDonald.

Books, cellphones, clothing and reading glasses are the most common items left behind, she says.

The most valuable items? A $10,000 diamond engagement ring, an NFL Super Bowl ring and professional video equipment — which all were returned to their owners.

Southwest stores items in a 4,000-square-foot area within a Dallas warehouse. Unclaimed items stay there 30 to 90 days, and the majority is then donated to the Salvation Army, McDonald says.

Most items left behind don't contain an owner's contact information and aren't reported lost, she says. Also, many electronic devices are locked, making it difficult to determine who owns them.

Airport security

American Airlines tries to reunite items with their owners "for several weeks," says airline spokesman Tim Smith. And, if that cannot be done, he says, items are sold to a salvage company.

The cost of returning items to owners is "significant," he says, much more than the income received from the salvage company. "Lost and found is a customer service — not a money maker," Smith says.

McCarran airport in Las Vegas says about 30,000 items — an average of 82 a day — are left behind each year.

Most are left at Transportation Security Administration checkpoints and turned over to the airport, says McCarran spokeswoman Candice Seeley.

The most common forgotten items: cellphones, eyeglasses, belts, watches, wallets and other belongings that "travelers shed in preparation for screening," Seeley says.

Most of the 15,936 items logged into the lost-and-found office at Oregon's Portland International Airport last year also were left at TSA checkpoints, says airport spokesman Steve Johnson.