Lost. And, Often, Found.

It wasn't the missing camera that Hayato Miwa grieved for; it was the contents.

Mr. Miwa, an assistant chef at the Gramercy New York pastry shop in Osaka, Japan, was touring top-tier New York restaurants with some fellow Japanese chefs to sample their pastries when he realized he had left his digital camera in a cab. It was worth only $200, but gone with it were photos he had taken of desserts concocted at Nobu, the Spice Market, Joseph's, the Park Avenue Cafe and the Gotham Bar & Grill.
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Jerry W. Hoefer for The New York Times

Blair Huber, a lost-and-found specialist for Southwest Airlines at Love Field in Dallas, may just have your cellphone.

Luckily for him, a couple found the camera and it was eventually reunited with its owner. "People had told Hayato New York is a dangerous city, that people here don't even smile," said Toyoko Kametani, a Japanese food company executive who organized the chefs' trip. "Now he thinks New Yorkers are wonderful."

More and more business travelers are finding occasion to gush similar sentiments, not only about New Yorkers, but about finders of lost goods all over the world. It turns out that people are losing more and more things because they are lugging so many additional gadgets and communications devices - and often misplacing them in airplanes and airports, hotel rooms, restaurants, cabs and rented cars.

A study conducted by Pointsec Mobile Technologies, a mobile-data protection software company in Chicago, found that the number of laptops abandoned in one London cab company's taxis rose 71 percent in the second half of last year from the same period in 2001, while the number of P.D.A.'s left behind shot up 350 percent.

Pointsec also tracked items left behind in taxis in eight other countries. One cab company in Chicago had the highest numbers: in the final six months of 2004, it found, in its 113 taxis, 387 mobile phones, 97 P.D.A.'s and Pocket P.C.'s and 20 laptops. (It did not have comparable 2001 data.) Extrapolating from those numbers, Pointsec calculated that 85,600 mobile phones, 21,500 P.D.A.'s or Pocket P.C.'s, and 4,425 laptops disappeared into Chicago's 25,000 cabs in those six months.

The plague of forgetfulness has given rise to several services that locate vanished goods. Trackitback (www.trackitback.com), in Winnipeg, Manitoba, uses coded identification labels and a reward system to encourage people to call a toll-free number when they find a lost item with the affixed label. A lifetime fee of $9.99 covers standard shipping costs.

BoomerangIt (www.boomerangit.com) in San Leandro, Calif., provides two labels and two snap-on luggage tags for $14.95. It charges a return fee of $10 for properly registered items, plus shipping and handling. Both companies respond to inquiries 24 hours a day.

Jet lag and fatigue are making road warriors on hectic travel schedules "slower on the uptake and more prone to forgetting stuff," said Doug Herrmann, a psychologist and memory specialist and professor emeritus at Indiana State University in Terre Haute.

Short of praying to St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost or stolen things, Mr. Herrmann counsels travelers to "imagine you're going into the jungle and take preventive measures," like keeping a tight grip on your cellphone, decorating your briefcase with bright colors to set it apart and making a paper checklist of all the important belongings you are taking with you.

The travel industry has mobilized its troops to help out. Andrea Torrance, executive director of rooms at Fairmont Hotels and Resorts, says the housekeeping employees at its 44 properties are instructed to check for lost items behind night tables and between sheets. "When guests check out, we open every drawer and closet," she said.

Karen M. Krugel, a senior account supervisor for Lou Hammond & Associates, a New York public relations firm specializing in travel, says such vigilance saved her from the doghouse with her new husband. At the Hotel Hershey in Hershey, Pa., she left a $5,000 diamond necklace, his wedding present to her, in a spa robe pocket. "I was sobbing like a 6-year-old," she said. Hotel employees, however, rifled through the pockets of every robe in the laundry hampers and found the jewelry.

The method of recovery was not quite so straightforward for Lee Hurley, editor in chief of Executive Traveler magazine, but he got his treasure back, too. He and his wife were celebrating their 16th wedding anniversary at the Westin Buckhead in Atlanta, and he had brought along a $90 Baccarat crystal wine glass, an anniversary gift, to share a toast over dinner in their room. They left the glass on the tray and room service took it away that night. The couple only realized their mistake the next morning.

"At first I thought, 'No problem, I'll call room service and surely they'll find it,' " said Mr. Hurley. "But I found out that a 365-room hotel stocks well over 1,000 glasses. Then I thought I'd go look for it myself. But insurance liability rules restrict nonemployees from kitchen areas." Room service soon called to say the glass could not be found.

Now panicked, Mr. Hurley called the manager on duty and declared his wife would not leave the hotel without it. Eighteen minutes later, they got it back.

Lost items are usually held for about five days at the terminal where they are found, then shipped to a central warehouse. At Dallas Love Field Airport, Southwest Airlines receives close to 11,000 articles each month, said Laura Adams, director of central baggage services for the carrier. Those unclaimed after 60 days are sold to a salvage company or donated to charities.

Airlines consider no lost item too insignificant, as John W. Lampl, a British Airways vice president, found out. He left the novel he was reading on a Continental Airlines flight from Newark to Miami in February. Back at the Miami airport five days later, he asked about the book. "Lo and behold, within 15 minutes a customer service rep was standing there with it," he said. "It had no monetary value but it meant something to me. They made me feel like a somebody. Hats off to them."

< It's pretty rare that we get to post something from the other side. Our hats off to those people who returned other people's stuff. We realize it's your perogative and that your willingness to do so depends on your life situation. Nevertheless, this makes for the best possible outcome and those of you whose life situation might not lead you to return an object of value but do so anyway, you may be foolish but you're certainly good. We particularly applaud good customer service. This is alltogether too rare and is one of the best ways to fight corporate evil. >