wutlol

I left an item in the Schengen Lounge. I reached out to Finnair on Twitter and they told me to contact HEL Lost and Found, rather than giving me contact info for the lounge.

I was somewhat surprised that a claim cost €4.95. Is this usual? I can’t recall ever seeing this at another airport and it kind of seems like a bizarre revenue stream to create.

temppa

Private lost and found agencies can charge 5% of the item value, but capped to 17€ (+ additional if transportation or special storage is needed). Private agencies can only hold items found from public places (public venue, transport, restaurants).

_kurt

The losing is completely free, actually. It's the finding that is done for a charge.

remymartin

I forgot an old belt in transfer security and ended up going to the same lost and found. Now I can say my belt is worth 17€!

SPBanker

Just retrieved my iPad stupidly left on LH848 last Wednesday. Yes, €17…

Harper50505

Lost and found at LHR has had a charge for years - but then LHR knows how to rip everyone off at every turn.

ranskis

A charge to retrieve a lost item, why not. However in Helsinki, there is also a charge to enquire by phone about a possibly lost item, just to know if it has been found or not. Once I forgot something in an AY aircraft without much value, it might have been sitting at the lost and found for a while!

ffay005

Helsinki is the only city in the world where you need to pay a surcharge for the privilege of being able to buy a ticket for local buses and trains. The ticket itself is a whopping 3.10 EUR for a five-minute journey, and on top of that, you will pay a 0.50 EUR surcharge if you buy your ticket at R Kioski or any other outlet, excluding ticket vending machines (which are in the process of being discontinued anyway). So yeah, Finland certainly is one of the most customer-unfriendly places in the world.

wutlol

This was my issue - charging me 5 euro simply to find out. It’s a damned charging case for cheap headphones that on its own is worthless.

intuition

In general, a lost&found is keen on returning items, becuase their primary cost is storage. A quick turnaround saves expenses.

In this case, adding a fee for enquiries, indicates their business modell is different. They add incentives for people to not retrieve lost items. I assume this is because they earn more money keeping the stuff for as long as the law requires them and then sell it. So basically a lost&sold ...

SPBanker

That’s actually not the case. The €4.95 fee means that for two weeks they will monitor (with help of key words & other information) incoming stuff and inform you if they get a hit. (The aforementioned iPad was found with the help of flight number.) Re-sale value of the stuff we lose is usually literally cents to the euro…

intuition

OK!
Still, the value of that service is zero if the search and 2 weeks monitoring turns up nothing.


Makes me think of swedish cities with public rental housing. Some administers the applicant queues themselves, and they are allowed to charge a fee once they actually brooker a rental contract. Ie they have incentive to actually put contracts to the queue.
Some cities instead decides to outsource applicant queue to private brookers, who simply charge a yearly fee to everyone in the queue. They have incentive to refrain from brookering contracts. (In major cities around 10% of population is in queue and average waiting time is 10+ years - a 20€ fee x 100 000 people is a nice yearly income of 2 MEUR per city, just to keep a listing of people in queue. Zero work. Zero churn.

SPBanker

Sure. It's a lottery... But they have an incentive to find owners for the stuff, because -- wait for it -- you have to pay to get your stuff back.

One can avoid the €4.95 fee by going to one of their offices yourself.

kauppias

they actually likely make more auctioning your stuff to the highest bidder at their lost and found auctions 🤣🤣😁