Cellphone left on airplane returned!
Took about five weeks, but my lost cellphone was returned through the Air France Lost & Found service. The phone was left in the seat pocket of the airplane that landed in Rome. I realized it had been left on the plane within 2 hours, but by then the plane had already left Rome.
With iphone tracking, I could see that my phone was at Paris Charles de Gaulle in the security building for Air France called Le Kube. The main goal at Le Kube is to handles all Air France lost luggage, which is usually tagged. It seems that once your item is at Le Kube, it's part of their lost and found system. There's no way to go to Le Kube or call Le Kube to claim any items.
On the phone, the Air France representative advised me to send an email to fco.ll25@swissport.com (which didn't amount to anything), and also to file a lost claim on the service franceobjetstrouves.fr. This service eventually resulted in the return of my phone.
In the lost claim, I posted details of the lost item, including photos and screenshots of the "Find My iphone" notification indicating its location at Le Kube. Basically, I knew where it was (probably in a box alongside lots of lost items), and had hopes that eventually
Then I waited. When I would remember another detail to add about the phone (e.g. type of case), it was easy to edit the lost claim. It was up to me to actively search (or run the automated search) the "found" listings on franceobjetstrouves. When any "found" item seemed to fit the description of my "lost" item, I notified the service that it was a potential match. Five times I tried to claim the same item, and five times I received an automated email that it was not my phone. However, on the 6th try (same potential match), I received a positive that it was my phone.
After 5 weeks at Le Kube Paris, this phone was finally about to be returned to me! I paid the fees which were ~$20 US for the finders' fee to franceobjetstrouves plus ~$80 US to ship via Chronopost/Fedex to me. Once the "found" matched with my "lost" claim, the process was quick, so 4 stars for that. Minus one star because I'm not sure anything would been returned to me if I'd only filed the "lost" claim and thought that was the end of it.
So if you've lost something on Air France, my advice to you is to keep returning to the site to search for your object, even weeks later.
Datum der Erfahrung: 17.01.2024