Airport to auction unclaimed baggage online

Philadelphia International Airport personnel are teaming with a local tech company to auction left-behind items from their baggage warehouse.

Airport officials claim an 80 percent success rate in returning unclaimed items to their owners, spokeswoman Mary Flannery said to CBS, but the items that can’t be returned are stored in a large warehouse.

Those items are now available in an online auction hosted by Center City tech company Municibid.com, the Philadelphia Business Journal added.

“From what we gather, [the airport] does a good job to make the item available to the people who actually lost it,” Municibid CEO Greg Berry said to the Business Journal. “Most people do call, and it is there, but then they don’t come and pick it up. Maybe they lost it, and they’re in some other country, or they just don’t care enough about it.”

The first round of items to be auctioned includes golf clubs, a chess set, various souvenirs and a trophy, CBS reported.

Flannery said that any money made from the auction will go “to the aviation fund, which pays for the hospitality we extend to passengers because of bad weather. We have hospitality kits, water, snacks, those kind of things – so we figure it will return to passengers in some way,” she was quoted by CBS.

Berry said to the Business Journal that items for auction usually have to remain unclaimed in the lost-and-found for a year.