Originally Posted by
Fly AA J all the way
I would email UA and tell them you found something in the seat pocket, you would like to return it to its rightful owner and that they should pass your contact info on to anyone who calls them claiming to have left something in the seat pocket. If, after say, a month nobody calls you, keep it. But I say better you than a UA employee.
This is a nice idea, but impractical. United has lost items every day -- probably on the order of dozens or hundreds -- and they put them into lost and found at the station where item was found.
Telling them that they should keep in your information "in case someone calls about a lost item" is not reasonable. Someone will call about a lost item, and it's highly likely it won't be the item you have, at least statistically.
I totally understand the reluctance to hand it over to United, of course. So maybe you should just report it to the airport police at the station where you departed from, and wait... Deposit it into a high yield account for a while, first, though.
