The Travelodge 2012 Lost and Found List

By ⋅ January 4, 2013 ⋅ Post a comment
Llanelli town centre (Photo: Hywel Williams)

Llanelli town centre (Photo: Hywel Williams)

Your Geo Quiz clues are:

Harry Potter’s magic wand, a bucket of live crabs, a valuable collection of stamps, and more than 75,000 teddy bears.

All those items have something in common — and we’ll get to that in a moment.

First the stamp collection. It was found in a town in Wales.

The town’s famous, in Wales at least, for its rugby team, its local brewery and for tinplate production. There’s so much tin plating done there that the town is nicknamed Tinopolis.

So can you name this town on the southern Welsh coast in the county of Carmarthenshire that looks out on the Atlantic?

The answer comes courtesy of James Pieslak. He’s with Travelodge which has more than 500 hotels in the UK. They’ve compiled a list of things left behind by the 10+ million customers who’ve stayed at one of their 500 hotels in the past year. The “lost and found” list includes everything from a magic wand to breast implants, from a diamond encrusted iPhone to a bucket of live crabs. As for the valuable stamps, an American traveller attending an antiquarian show in the Welsh town of Llanelli (roughly pronounced “Clanethli”) accidentally left them behind in his hotel room.

A few other ususual things show up on the 2012 Travelodge “Lost and Found” List:

A winning EuroMillions ticket
Keys to a Bugatti racecar
A stamp album worth a quarter of a million dollars
A set of London Olympic tickets
A trunk of chocolate bars
A diamond encrusted wedding ring
A Persian Chinchilla kitten named Porsha
A suitcase full of vinyl records
A set of false teeth with diamonds
A Rolex watch
A tiffany engagement ring
A pilot’s training manual
Joseph’s Dream Coat
Pantomime Horse
7,000 copies of Fifty Shades of Grey
76,500 teddy bears
A bucket of live crabs

The 3 books most often left behind in Travelodge hotels during 2012:

Fifty Shades of Grey E.L. James
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Stieg Larsson
The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest Stieg Larsson

Is there anything YOU regret leaving in a hotel room?

Or did you go to extraordinary lengths to get something back?

Better yet: is there anything you wish you’d left behind in that hotel room?

Share your story below in the comments!

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Discussion

2 comments for “The Travelodge 2012 Lost and Found List”

  • http://twitter.com/katywhowaited Katy Who Waited

    I have a file box of 40 year old love letters that my husband sent almost
    daily from Vietnam starting from the time he went to Basic Training in 1969 through 1970 when President Nixon granted “early outs”.  The letters
    are not great literary works, but I have been posting them on hubpages on the
    internet and try to connect each letter to a topic related to war or politics
    or falling in love that is pertinent to today.  I sometimes take the file
    box with me when traveling so I can continue to work on the project.  Last
    year, I took the box of 40 year old letters to the LaQuinta Inn and Suites in Santa Clarita, CA.  I hadn’t
    realized I had left the box at the hotel until SEVERAL WEEKS after our stay. Once I realized where I left the letters,  I was certain that they would be gone, especially since so much time had elapsed. However, I immediately picked up the phone, some time late in the evening, and called the front desk of LaQuinta trying to
    describe the file box as tears rolled down my cheeks. The clerk said he’d have
    the manager call me the next day; I hung up the phone hoping against hope. The next day, the manager DID call and started to ask me to
    describe the box.  I still was certain that it was a futile endeavor until
    I heard the smile in her voice over the phone:  ”Housekeeping found
    it,” she explained, “I knew they were important when I saw the dates on
    the letters.”  Since there was no way to identify to whom the letters
    belonged, she simply locked up the box in her safe hoping someone might
    eventually call, and I did!  I have never been so grateful to two people,
    the manager and the housekeeper, in my life.  They are my heroes since
    they very well could have ignored the box and simply thrown out 40 years of
    history. Not only were these two people professional, but they were kind of heart. (You can bet no
    matter where we travel, we always look for a LaQuinta hotel.)  I have lost
    momentum in my posting of the letters, and I’m still only half way through, but my New
    Years Resolution is to finish recording them and tweaking the pages.  After
    all, the actions of the hotel manager and the housekeeper make the letters
    deserving of that much!  http://katywhowaited.hubpages.com/hub/00-Index-to-Love-Letters-from-Vietnam

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=19103358 Tess Dornfeld

    WELL funny you should ask, as I just concluded a fifteen-month effort to recover some left-behinds. The whole story makes more sense if you’re familiar with Hash House Harriers, the international “drinking club with a running problem.” I try to attend a Hash wherever I travel, since it’s a great way to meet locals, especially expats, and to see a different side of the locale. And to drink.

    I had been on a St. Patty’s Day Hash while staying in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, and received a commemorative t-shirt, one of few mementos from a four-month trip. I wore this shirt, per Hash custom, along with the favorite running shorts that have been with me for at least nine years and twelve countries (including many Hashes) to a Hash in Madrid in August 2011. When I left my hotel room the next morning to head to the airport to fly home, both were forgotten behind the bathroom door.

    I quickly realized and wrote to the hotel, Novotel Campo de las Naciones, part of a large European chain from what I can tell. They were able to find my clothes, but informed me that they were unable to ship them to me in the U.S. and I would have to find a company who could pick up from the hotel and then send them to me. This seemed a bit absurd to me- a little place in rural Costa Rica had put my left-behind swimsuit on three buses for me once- but what could I do? I spent a few weeks looking for such a shipping company to no avail. So I wrote to a family friend in Madrid to see if she could pick up and mail my clothes for me, which she said she would.

    Five months later, having neither received nor heard anything from the family friend, I saw that an old classmate was living in Madrid. She was quick to reply that she’d be happy to help me get my clothes back. I checked with the hotel again that they still had the clothes and told them someone would be picking them up for me.

    Well, then I got a more-than-full-time job and didn’t think about it again until last July, when I added checking in with the old classmate to the to-do list, but my internet access had become very limited, so it didn’t happen. I did, however, semi-seriously consider routing my next trip in that direction through Madrid just to get them myself. Imagine my joy, then, when I got an email from the old classmate in October saying she’d gotten sick shortly after she first heard from me and had to return to the U.S., but was now back in Madrid and would be happy to give it another try.

    I wrote to the hotel apprehensively to make sure they still had my clothes, and they replied that they did! Finally, I thought, I was really going to get them back. I replied to the friend in Madrid: all systems go! A couple days later, I receive another email from the hotel: had I gotten their second email? No I had not. Well, turns out my clothes were still in their lost-and-found registry, but they had actually been discarded.

    I managed not to cry (too much) when I saw that email at work, but I did have a big glass of wine and a bunch of leftover Halloween candy when I got home that night. I finally brought myself to write to the hotel one last time to make sure they were certain my clothes were gone, and they replied, “Yes, after one year we removed all the items of our storage room due to the space. Sorry for the troubles caused. Have a good day!” Like hell I will. Even after I’d been emailing them for seven months trying to get my clothes back, they couldn’t drop me a line before they tossed them? And they really didn’t have enough storage in their 246-room hotel for two small items of clothing?

    I know plenty of the blame is on me, too, but that doesn’t make it any easier to accept, especially after trying for so long and coming so close, or at least thinking I had. It may not have been a Tiffany ring or diamond-studded dentures, but those clothes were still special to me. You can bet I’ll be triple-checking behind every bathroom door from now on.