Frequent business traveler Joyce Gioia forgot more than $20,000 worth of jewelry in her hotel room in Italy last year.
Luckily for Gioia, the jewelry was in a room safe, and staff at the Rome Marriott Grand Hotel Flora shipped the items to her home in Austin.
"I had done such a dumb thing, and I was very happy to get the jewelry back," says Gioia, a management consultant.
Travelers annually leave millions of personally important items such as wallets, keys, cellphones and eyeglasses behind in hotels, airports, airplanes and rental cars. Fortunately for the forgetful, many belongings — including very valuable and unusual ones such as Gioia's jewelry — are returned.
Many, however, aren't, and they are given away or sold if their owners don't retrieve them or their owners cannot be found.
Instead of chintz, plastic Teasmades and cheap pine furniture, at 40 Winks in Stepney Green, east London, there are extravagant artworks, antiques and an 
You won't find too many bargain basement hotel rooms here so a two-day stop is a more realistic proposition for those visiting on an average budget. 
Across the UK, the average price paid in 2009 for a hotel room was £84, down from £97 the previous year – a 13 per cent fall – according to the survey. 