Since we’ve been helping people find lost items in Thailand for a couple of years at one of our other websites, we have noticed that the same items are lost a lot. We compiled this list of the most popular lost items in Thailand based on a couple of locations. See if these make sense to you.
While the specific items people lose can vary depending on individual circumstances and daily activities, here’s a list of some common things that people often misplace:
Items Lost Most Often in Thailand While on Vacation
- Keys. Certainly one of the most lost and most important items that are lost often in Thailand is keys. Keys to your house, car, motorbike, and office are usually on the same keyring to make it ‘easy’. It’s also very easy to lose your keys, isn’t it? Solution: Before you lose your keys the next time, add an Apple Airtag or similar tracking device so you can always look up the location of your keys when you’ve misplaced them. Cost: $30.
- Wallets and Purses. Men and women and those who identify as something else often lose wallets and purses. It’s hard to imagine something more important than a purse or wallet, but now the mobile phone could surpass its importance, couldn’t it? Solution: Keep purses and wallets inside a backpack as you travel around Thailand. Don’t put it in the usual spots. Besides being easily stolen, you can misplace them often.
- Mobile Phones. Lose your mobile phone today and you may lose your bank account, crypto investments, driver’s license, cherished photos and videos, and access to your important social media accounts. That’s a pretty big loss! Lost phones are one of the top items we are asked to find. It’s very hard, but we have some successes. Solution: Tracking app like ‘Find My,’ Apple’s tracker for many of their devices.
- Glasses/Sunglasses. Ray Bans, Maui Jim, and other high priced sunglasses are lost often. I have lost every pair I’ve ever had, so I stopped buying them about 10 years ago. There’s no real tracking solution, unless you have some smart glasses, but it’s coming in the near future.
- Hats. Hats are often left at the beach, on a table, knocked onto the floor and forgotten, etc. You could put a tracking tag in your hat if it was that important to you. Up to you!
- Remote controls. In our home in Thailand we have 5 remote controls for our air conditioning and 2 for our television and cable. The TV remotes are never lost. The a/c remotes are constantly lost. Try to choose a place everyone agrees to place them when not using them. Otherwise, you’ll accuse your family members of having last misplaced it!
- Credit cards. This happens QUITE often in Thailand and we’ve written a helpful page about it here so you can see how ATMs work in Thailand and why you’re likely to lose a credit card or bank card at one of them. Here it is – How to Use Thailand ATM without Losing Card.
- Passport. If you travel to Thailand and then don’t leave the country to go to nearby places and just remain in TH, you may misplace your passport because you just don’t need it for much of anything. You’ll need it renting a motorbike, so it’s possible to forget they kept it. Note – it’s illegal to keep the passport for a motorbike rental. They can ONLY keep a copy.
- Wedding Rings (all rings). An Indian man filled out the Lost Item Report Form a month ago. He lost his wedding ring while snorkeling on the 4-island tour in Krabi. He lost it in about 2 meters (6+ feet) of water. He wanted to offer a 2,000 THB reward. He didn’t want to pay for the person or people to go there and try to find the item (around 8,000 THB ($240 USD) so we couldn’t help him. He was near frantic. We strongly suggest you do not wear your wedding rings or any important jewelry when you come to Thailand.
- AirPods, PixelBuds (Earphones/Headphones). The earphones that stick in your ear can fall out without you even noticing. I’ve sometimes caught myself right before turning on the shower. They’re hard to detect if they’re not on. They don’t fit many ears as well, so they fall out and can fall down a drain or into the water at the beach or anywhere.
- Necklaces, Bracelets, and Earrings. Gold necklaces are sometimes stolen in Thailand, in Pattaya especially, but by far the biggest cause of lost items like these is that they simply break and fall off – completely unnoticed, at least for a while. The chance of finding these is very low, but if the piece is especially nice, someone may turn it in to a lost/found office or store manager or security.
- Nintendo Switch. Small computer games go missing pretty often, maybe because of theft as well, but they are lost and misplaced temporarily because sometimes people are under the influence of drugs and aren’t really paying attention!
- GoPros, Cameras, Video Cameras. I think most of the time, these items are stolen. They’re expensive, easy to resell, and a good percentage of tourists have them in Thailand and can be scatterbrained about keeping track of where they are.
- Shirts and Scarves. Any possession that can blow off a motorbike or out a window, off a boat, can be lost easily in Thailand. Check the roads for lost items as you ride around! They’re everywhere!
- Chargers and Charging Cables. It’s so easy to lose these things. You should probably just call it a loss and go buy another one because people generally just take them without making an effort to find who lost them.
- Tickets (Airline, Bus, Van, Ferry). Though we don’t get many reports filed about these, we do know that tickets of all kinds are frequently lost in Thailand. One solution is to put them deep in a pocket (zipped, if possible) in your backpack and carry that bag everywhere.
- Backpacks. These are lost less often than smaller bags, purses, and wallets, but they still rank high up there for lost possessions. We suggest you bring your backpack everywhere. Put money, phone, laptop, tickets, passport, wallet, purse, and everything important in it.
- Suitcases and Bags at the Airports. – We get a LOT of lost item reports for lost bags at the airport. Each airline has policies in effect for what you should do, and we can’t really help with this unless you want someone that speaks Thai to help you follow up on where your bags are and when they will be delivered to you.
- Drones. We get ‘drone lost’ reports often from Krabi, Phuket, Pattaya, and Ko Samui. The winds are stronger by the water. The storms come up fast. The GPS systems just don’t work that well and the return to home features often fail, leaving the drone in the middle of a jungle somewhere, on an island, or in the Andaman Sea. Solution: Put a tracking device with a Thai SIM card on your drone so you don’t lose it!
- Medication. For some reason, we see lots of unused medication laying around in Thailand. Last night at a restaurant we saw some pills on a table as we were leaving. The table was empty already, someone had just forgotten it. Suggestion – keep your meds deep in a backpack pocket. Keep your prescription drug scripts and photos of what your medication looks like, and the lables, to show pharmacists if you do lose a medication or run out.
Of course, this list isn’t exhaustive, but these are some of the most commonly lost items in Thailand based on the reporting forms we’ve collected for the past couple of years.
One way you can protect your belongings is to add an Apple AirTag to your important items.
