Lost & Found

Report it straightaway

Call us, message us on WhatsApp, or write to us the moment you notice something is missing. Every channel is listed at /contact. Tell us the date of your trip, the vehicle if you know it, and what the item is, and we give you a reference you can quote when you follow up.

The sooner you tell us, the better the odds of finding it. A vehicle that has just dropped you off is often only minutes from picking up its next passenger, and every trip after yours makes the seats, the door pockets and the boot a little harder to search with confidence. If you notice something is missing while you are still near the drop-off point, calling straightaway, rather than writing an email you expect us to read later, gives the driver the best chance of checking before he moves on to his next duty.

The reference number is not a formality. It links your report to the specific trip, the specific vehicle and the specific driver, so that whoever in our office you speak to next, whether that is the same person or somebody else, can see the whole history in one place without asking you to repeat the date, the pick-up point and the description of the item all over again. Quote it whenever you call or write, and if you are still waiting to hear back after a few days, quoting it is the fastest way to have your case looked at rather than logged as a new one.

What we do next

We contact the driver directly and ask him to check the vehicle before it goes back into service. Where your trip involved a hotel, a wedding venue or another location the vehicle stood at, we get in touch with them as well, since an item left in a car is sometimes found by their staff rather than ours.

In practice, this means we call the driver, describe the item exactly as you have described it to us, and ask him to check the places something actually ends up: under the front and rear seats, in the door pockets and the seatback pockets, along the boot and under any luggage still inside it, and in the gap between the seat and the console where a phone or a card most often slides. If he is between trips when we reach him, he checks immediately and calls us back with what he has found, or has not. If he is already on his next duty, we ask him to check the moment it ends, and again when the vehicle comes back to us at the end of the day, since a first look sometimes misses what a second, unhurried one does not.

Where a hotel, a wedding venue or another location is involved, we do not simply assume the item stayed in the car. A bag, a phone or a set of keys is just as likely to have been set down at a reception desk, handed to a doorman, or left on a seat while getting in or out of the vehicle. In these cases we call the venue directly, describe the item and the approximate time the vehicle was there, and ask them to check with their own front desk or housekeeping staff as well as with us. We keep you updated on both threads rather than closing the search the moment our own check comes back empty.

How long we hold it

Once an item is found and returned to our office, this is how long we hold it for you to collect.

We hold an ordinary item, a bag, a jacket, an umbrella, a charger, for 30 days. A document that establishes your identity or a valuable, a passport, a card, jewellery, cash, a laptop, is held for 90 days, because losing one of these is a bigger inconvenience to sort out and you may need more time to notice it is missing, arrange to collect it, or decide how you want it returned. Both windows run from the day the item reaches our office, not from the day of your trip, so if a driver only hands something in after his vehicle returns to the yard, the clock starts then.

Personal belongings are carried at your own risk and we are not liable for items left unattended in a vehicle. We will nonetheless make every reasonable effort to trace and return lost property, and we hold found property for 30 days (90 days for identity documents and valuables). Any of our people who fails to hand in found property is dismissed and reported to the police.

If you know an item is with us but genuinely cannot collect it within these windows, tell us. We would rather hear from you and hold something a little longer for a good reason, air travel, a hospital stay, being outside India, than dispose of something you are still coming back for. This is at our discretion and is not a right you can rely on, so the sooner you get in touch the safer your item is.

Identification and collection

To collect an item, you, or somebody you have authorised in writing to collect it on your behalf, need to show photo identification and give us enough detail to establish the item is yours. Whoever collects it signs for it, and that signature is our record that the item reached you.

We ask for this because a lost bag or an unattended phone is exactly the kind of thing somebody with no claim to it might try to collect on a plausible-sounding description. A brief description over the phone, the colour of a bag or the make of a phone, is easy to guess or overhear. Asking you to confirm a specific detail only the owner would know, what is inside a bag, the last few digits of a card, the lock screen on a phone, protects you as much as it protects us, and it is the same check any responsible custodian of somebody else’s property would run before handing it over.

If you cannot come yourself, put the authorisation in writing, by email or WhatsApp message, naming the person who will collect it and describing the item. That person carries their own photo identification and the authorisation when they come, and we keep a copy of both against the item’s record. We will not release an item to somebody who simply turns up saying you sent them, however plausible it sounds on the phone, because that is precisely the situation this check exists for.

Return by courier

If you cannot collect an item in person, we can send it to you by courier at your cost, insured and with tracking. We do not courier cash, jewellery, a passport or an original document unless you instruct us to in writing, and even then we prefer an in-person handover to you, or to somebody you name, wherever that is practical.

Once you confirm the address and we have your written go-ahead, we pack the item ourselves at our office, book it with a courier that gives us a tracking number, and send that number to you the same day so you can follow it without having to ask us for an update. The courier charge is added to your invoice or collected before dispatch, whichever is more convenient for you, and we always choose insured shipping over the cheapest option, because the point of the exercise is that the item reaches you in the condition it left in, not that it reaches you cheaply.

A higher-value item, an expensive phone, a camera, jewellery, is treated with extra care, because a courier consignment, however well insured, is still a package changing hands several times between our office and your door, and each handover is a point where something could go wrong. For these, we prefer to arrange collection in person, by you or by somebody you authorise, or to hold the item until you are next passing through the area. Where courier really is the only practical option, we insure it for its full declared value, not a notional one, and we tell you exactly which courier, which service and which tracking number we have used before it leaves our hands.

High-value items, passports and documents

A passport, another identity document, a bank or payment card, or an item of significant value may be handed to the police or to the authority that issued it, rather than held by us. Where we do this, we tell you, and we tell you which police station or authority now has it.

A lost passport found by a private party and simply handed back informally can create complications for the owner later, at immigration, when applying for a duplicate, or if the original is ever found to have been used by somebody else in the gap. Handing it to the police station nearest to where it was found, or to the passport issuing authority, creates an official record that it was recovered and by whom, and that record protects you if any question about it is ever raised. The same reasoning applies to a bank or payment card: the issuing bank can block and reissue it far faster and more securely than we can hand it back to you across a city, and reporting it lets them do that the moment it is found rather than whenever you next collect from our office.

We do this as soon as practicable, generally within a day or two of the item reaching our office, so do let us know quickly if you would rather collect it from us directly before that happens. Once it has gone to the police or the issuing authority, we can no longer hand it back to you ourselves, and you will need to deal with them directly using the reference we give you, along with a copy of the report where one is issued. We stay in touch through that process if you need us to confirm the trip details or the date the item was found.

What we are not liable for

An item left unattended in the vehicle, rather than handed to the driver or reported before the trip ends, is at your own risk, as set out above. Our full position on liability is at /legal/limitation-of-liability.

This policy sits alongside, and does not replace, our general position on liability. We are responsible for running a roadworthy vehicle with a verified driver and for handling your trip with reasonable care, and we make every reasonable effort described on this page to trace and return something left behind. We are not an insurer of your personal belongings, and carrying, checking and keeping track of what you bring into the vehicle remains your responsibility, in the same way it would in a taxi, a train or any other vehicle that is not exclusively yours. Nothing on this page or in /legal/limitation-of-liability excludes our liability where the law does not allow it to be excluded, and neither page attempts to.

If an item is damaged while it is in our care, between being found and being returned or couriered to you, that is a different question from an item simply going missing, and it is covered by the same limitation of liability that governs the rest of your trip. Tell us straightaway if you notice damage on collection, and we will look into how and when it happened.

Unclaimed property

An item nobody claims within its storage period is disposed of once that period ends. We keep a record of what was found, when it was disposed of, and how.

Disposal means different things for different kinds of item. Something of no resale value, a phone charger, a single glove, a child’s toy, is simply discarded. Something with value but no traceable owner, cash, jewellery, an electronic device, is handled in line with how such property is ordinarily dealt with once genuinely unclaimed, which may mean donating it, selling it and keeping a record of the sale, or handing it to the relevant authority, depending on what the item is. None of our people benefits personally from what is disposed of.

The record we keep against each item, what it was, when it was found, who reported it, when it was disposed of and how, exists so that if you get in touch after the storage period asking about something, we can tell you honestly what happened to it rather than having no answer at all. It will not get your item back once the period has passed, but it means the trail does not simply disappear.

Zero tolerance for misappropriation

Found property belongs to whoever lost it, until it is returned or disposed of under this policy. It is never anybody at Om Travels’ own property to keep, and the clause above sets out what happens to anyone who fails to hand it in.

Every driver knows, before he is put on a duty, that anything found in a vehicle belongs to the passenger who lost it and to nobody else, and that handing it in is not optional or something he can decide the value of for himself. A driver who keeps something he finds, however small it seems to him, is treated the same way as one who takes something that was never his to begin with, because that is exactly what it is.

We take this seriously because trust is the whole of what we are selling. A passenger who leaves a bag, a phone or an envelope of cash on the back seat is trusting a stranger with it for the length of the trip, and that trust only means something if it holds when nobody but the driver is watching. If you ever have reason to believe an item you lost with us was not handled the way this page describes, tell us directly. We would rather know and act on it than have it go unreported.

If it is not resolved

If a search does not turn up your item, or you are not satisfied with how your case was handled, our Grievance Officer and the full escalation ladder are at /grievance-redressal.

We would rather resolve this with you directly, and most cases are, but the escalation route exists for when a search genuinely does not turn anything up, or when you feel your report was not followed through the way this page describes. Raising it with the Grievance Officer does not require you to have exhausted anything else first, and it does not affect any other right you have under Indian consumer law.