Originally Posted by
SMK77
There seems to be two things going on at the same time:
Every time any of the cabin crew finds an item they move heaven and earth to ensure you get your items back. I have left anything from a jacket to an iPad and in both cases someone was running after me all the way to immigration. That's an outstanding attitude and a real life and time saver.
Once the cleaning team takes over however, items seem to mysteriously disappear. While it did not happen to me, I had two frequent flyer friends telling me that they left something on the plane and despite filing a report nothing could be found. My only conclusion is that cleaning crews are very quick to discard things (as in: throw away) as they are under huge time pressure to get an aircraft turned around and they are not paid for completing all the paperwork necessary to get an item to lost and found.
Spot on, we had exactly the second experience.
IIRC, we were inbound to SIN on an A330 coming in Biz from DPS or was it KIX ??? (yes, it was while ago, anyways), and my wife had left her Panasonic Lumix camera in a brownish case in the deep side storage / pocket of the window seat (the seat also was brownish / creamish colored). No way for crew to spot it as it wasn't on the seat or the armrest area or so. We left the plane, went through immigration and when waiting at the luggage belt realized the mishap. We reported it to the lost and found (SATS) right away and they checked with the cleaners and the answers was nothing was found. To be fair SIA even asked the cabin crew that operated the next segment to MEL (a Weber angled flat seat for 8 hours, those were the days of torture
) to check the seat pocket again, but it was reported empty the next day.
Overall fine, as of course it was our fault. A passing passenger disembarking through the J cabin could not have grabbed it as not visible (deep window seat pocket). What irked me a fair bit then was that the SIA CA folks (Customer Affairs) in the follow up somehow thought they needed to double down to state that their cleaners are outmost reliable and would never take anything (a bold statement, but we never said they took it, maybe it was discarded accidentally, though a camera case with a camera in it is not a normal piece of trash) and further that the aircraft was inspected after cleaning and that the seat pocket in question was found to be empty. Now anyone who knows the procedures on the ground during a/c turnaround knows that there is an inspection carried out not so much for cleanliness, but to ensure no "sinister devices / items" were intentionally left behind posing a danger to the a/c and they do check bathrooms and seat pockets and such. Them overlooking a kind of electronic device would have been bad.
However, with all that it kind of left that odd unspoken "vacuum" of sorts where the only remaining logical conclusion may have been that we had made it up and (in a veiled verbal way) were basically lying. As we never asked for any compensation nor made any accusations, it was just odd, maybe a language issue. Anyways, that didn't sit well me with me initially though I got over it, but I was a sour grape for a while
. And of course, I had to buy the wife a new camera even though I didn't leave it behind
.