What really happens when you lose your phone on a flight

Chris Price News
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Airlines are leaving customers in the lurch by shirking or outsourcing responsibility for lost items like phones, a Which? investigation has found.

When Which? surveyed members about their experiences with airlines last year, less than half (48%) of those who had lost a phone on a flight said it had been successfully returned.

Which? put this to the test by purchasing four iPhones and deliberately leaving them on flights with four major UK carriers: BA, easyJet, Jet2 and Ryanair. Only two – those lost with Jet2 and Ryanair – were recovered. 

On each phone, investigators activated Apple’s ‘Find My Phone’ tracking system so they could see where it went and monitor efforts made by airlines to recover them, and to make things even easier for airline staff, remotely set up a message on the lockscreen saying ‘This phone is lost’ and with a number displayed for the finder to call.
 
Researchers left the first iPhone on a British Airways flight from Larnaca to Heathrow.
 
British Airways, like all four airlines Which? tested, effectively leaves its lost property management to a third party – in BA’s case, Smarte Carte. Even immediately after the phone had been left behind – when tracking still showed it to be on or near the plane – Which?’s researchers were unable to deal with BA directly.
 
Instead they were directed to Smarte Carte, where they were able to browse a list online of 36 lost phones at Heathrow. However, the phone had not been recovered and was not listed.
 
Just a day later, Which? could see the phone had moved. But rather than being sent to a reclaim facility, it was now about 15 miles from Heathrow, apparently in a cottage just a short drive from Windsor Castle.
 
Which? reported this to the police, who gave Which? a crime reference number and confirmed that the address was not linked to anyone working at Heathrow. They made a visit to the cottage and spoke to the residents, but by this time the phone had stopped broadcasting its location – it had either been switched off or the battery had died – and the phone was not recovered.

Which?’s experience with easyJet was similar. After its researchers left a phone on a flight from Nice to Luton, they were unable to speak to anyone at the airline who could help. Instead, easyJet directed them to their baggage handler Menzies, which told them to register the item as lost on another third-party website. 

After registering, a confirmation email was promised – but none arrived. easyJet’s website says items not claimed within 24 hours are passed to the airport’s lost property office, but upon inquiring, Luton Airport told Which? it doesn’t handle items left on planes. Like BA, easyJet didn’t offer any further advice or help in finding the phone. 

On this occasion, the tracking didn’t work, meaning Which?’s researchers were unable to remotely locate the phone. They never received any communication from airline or airport staff to indicate the phone had been found, and the phone was never recovered.

Which?’s experience of a lost phone with Jet2 was more positive. As with other airlines, Which? was told to contact a third party after ‘losing’ a phone on a flight from Alicante to Birmingham – in this case the airport’s lost property office. Yet positively, a day after reporting the phone missing, Which?’s researcher received an email saying it had been found. The only catch was the requirement to pay a fee of £27 to claim it back. 

The final phone Which? abandoned on a Ryanair flight from Malta to Stansted. Though Ryanair asserts planes are cleaned on every turn around, the phone was somehow missed after Which?’s investigator disembarked in London – with Find My Phone showing it made it from Stansted to its next stop in Bari, Italy before being spotted.  At Bari airport, a kindly airport employee phoned to say they’d found it – and it was couriered back for a 60 Euro fee.

Says Rory Boland, Editor of Which? Travel: 

“These days a phone is far from just a phone – it’s your wallet, photo album, and when you’re flying, it’s more often than not your boarding pass, too. When passengers lose something so vital you would expect airlines to have systems in place to quickly and easily return it to you, but when we tried misplacing our own phones we found this was too often not the case. 

“Frustratingly, in the vital first few hours after an item is lost, there’s no way of getting in touch with the airline to help. Even if you can see it’s still on the plane, you’ll be directed to airport staff or a third-party company. How hard can it be for airlines, which have staff onboard, to organise for lost items to be handed in and secured so that their customers are reunited. As it stands, most carriers won’t even pick up the phone to help.”  

 

 
Chris Price
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