My son lost his phone at Gatwick airport last week.

It has been found and handed in lost property.

Anyone want to have a guess at how much they charge to :
Give it to someone in person at the airport
Send it to a UK adress
Send it to a French adress

Clue :Robbing bstards !

is it cheaper to buy a new phone?

£20
£35
£90

In that order.

£20
£30
£49

Absolute joke !

In laws go through the airport next week so they could pick it up, but then they need to send it to us in France.

if someone found my phone at an airport and gave it back to me i’d probably give them £20 as grateful thanks

£10 if you collect it yourself! I left my keys at the x-ray security nonsense zone. They went to the (outsourced) lost property and I picked them up on return from holiday. £10! What happened to, “here are your keys, which are yours hence no charge”.

I live 15 minutes down the road if you want someone to collect it I would happily do you the favour and post it on.

Thanks but my in laws will collect it next week but they will have to pay £20.

Bit of a rip off, but still, its cheaper than buying a new phone. I’d be happy to pay that TBH.

yes still cheaper than new phone , but how can they justify £30 to send it ?

how can they justify £30 to send it ?

Seems reasonable to me given the staffing etc they have to have in place at the airport plus the onward shipping costs etc

i guess if you have a brand new iphone x it is ok , but for an old iphone 5 , it seems very expensive ;

how can they justify £30 to send it ?

Because they have to employ people, and pay them a wage, to deal with stuff that other people lose.
Add in the costs of packaging and posting, materials and somewhere to actually do it all from.
Seems reasonable to me.

they are holding/returning ‘a’ phone – not selling you one

given current security situation, count yourself lucky that it wasn’t destroyed, or the airport evacuated and you asked to pick up the bill.

Dont forget the postage probably carries a level of insurance too.

We left some hand luggage there in 2016. They log everything online and you can phone someone up, say it’s yours (you have to prove it) and they post it to you. All of that costs money.

They’re offering a service and services cost money. I’m sure you wouldn’t be pleased if the company you work for wanted to employ you and the services you offer for free.

I’m bracing myself for retrieval of my daughters iPad from Gatwick.

i understand they dont do it for free but £49 to send a phone to france is a lot .

would be cheaper to send a whole bike !

Well I guess they’re an external company so pay extortionate rent rates to Gatwick Airport because airports don’t make money from airlines anymore due to the pressure on airline tickets, so they’re turning themselves into big shopping malls.

I think charging for postage is fair enough but a bit of a piss take to charge you if you pick it up

Why? they’ve got to warehouse it, organise it, catalogue it, have a system to retrieve it, pay people to do all that, insure it, dispose of it when it is not collected. We’re not talking about a few items in the bottom draw of an office filing cabinet here. We’re talking more like something akin to the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Arc!

i understand they dont do it for free but £49 to send a phone to france is a lot .

would be cheaper to send a whole bike !

Try leaving your bike at an airport and see.

I’ll bet you it isn’t.

I think charging for postage is fair enough but a bit of a piss take to charge you if you pick it up

If they didn’t charge anything for collections, then there wouldn’t be a collection service available.
Who would pay the wage of the person who sat at a desk all day for you to drop by and collect it?
If there was no charge, then your stuff would just have been left where you abandoned it, until it was either nicked or thrown away.

TfL store around 300,000 items a year that are left on the trains/tube. That’s got to cost someone, and it should be the people that can’t look after their stuff.

At Gatwick Airport alone, between 1,000 and 1,800 bins are filled each month with items that have been confiscated, or left behind by passengers. So where do all those backpacks, corkscrews and bottles of suncream go?

This is just from the security scanning area. Someone has to be paid to go through it all.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travel-truths/What-happens-to-items-lost-at-airports/