Smart way to return a lost property

Last week we told the story of a reader called Barbara who left her wallet on an Aer Lingus flight to Madrid. It was lost, then found, and then lost again.

The sorry tale prompted a Dublin reader called Carole to drop us a line. “My daughter lives in Brisbane, and she and her husband visited friends in Sydney for the weekend,” she writes. “She left her Blackberry phone on the flight home to Brisbane on Sunday night, but realised this only when they got home.”

Carole, who lives in Foxrock, Co Dublin, got a text from the airline, which she does not name, saying that a Blackberry had been found on a plane, along with a contact number which she was asked to call. “I hadn’t a clue what this was about. It turns out that when it was handed in to airport staff, they had the brains to look at the last five numbers and texts used, and texted each of them about the Blackberry. Efficient or what? I was astounded. Can you imagine that happening in Ireland?”

A simple thing like returning lost property to its owner should be straightforward. Get your act together, Aer Lingus.