Left something at your hotel in Korea? How to get it shipped home

Hotels are good at keeping things and not set up to send them. A front desk has a lost-property shelf and a procedure for holding items. It does not have packing materials, an account with an international carrier, or a way to take your payment for postage.

International shipping also creates questions that a hotel does not want to answer. Staff would have to fill in a customs declaration for something that is not theirs, describe its contents and value, and take responsibility if it is lost or damaged on the way. The polite answer is no.

Three more things often slow this down:

• The hotel replies in Korean, by phone or by an email that you might not notice.
• Items are kept for a limited period. After that they may be handed on or disposed of, and how long that is depends on the hotel.
• Some items cannot go by post. Batteries, power banks, and liquids are the usual ones, and rules depend on the destination.

If what you left behind is your passport, stop and treat it differently. Contact your embassy before anything else, and do not send a passport by courier.

Do these as soon as you notice, even from the airport:

1. Contact the hotel and give your booking name, room number, and dates. Describe the item: color, brand, and where you think you left it.
2. Ask for a photo so you know it is really yours.
3. Ask them to hold it, and ask until when. Get that in writing, by email or message.
4. Ask whether they will release it to someone you name, and what they need from you to do that.

After that, you need someone in Korea. These are the options:

• A friend or colleague in Korea can pick it up and take it to the post office. EMS is the usual choice, and it needs a customs form listing contents and value.
• Domestic forwarding works if you already have a forwarding address in Korea. A local courier can take it from the hotel to that warehouse, if the hotel will hand it over.
• Someone you know who is flying home from Korea can carry it, if it is small and allowed in their luggage.

When filling in a customs form, describe the item honestly and give a true value. A used personal item is still declared. Your country's customs office decides whether you owe duty on it.

If the hotel asks you to arrange a courier yourself, you will find that most Korean booking systems need a Korean phone number and that the driver will call the hotel in Korean. This is often where people get stuck.

We collect it, pack it, and send it to you, and you see the full price before anything moves. Send us the hotel name, what you left, and the name on the booking. We contact the hotel in Korean and confirm they have it.

After collection, we send photos so you can check it is the right thing and that it is packed properly. Then it goes by EMS and we share the tracking number. Costs and timing are on our left-behind page.

We usually reply within 30 minutes during service hours. If you are still in Korea and have just moved on to another city, the item can often go directly to your next hotel instead.

A guest had already flown home when they realized they had left wireless earbuds at their hotel in Seoul. The hotel was holding them, but the guest could not go back.

They first asked us to ship the earbuds home. Items with a lithium battery need separate handling on a flight, and we gave them the full cost before anything moved. It was more than they wanted to spend, so they asked for something else: a friend was staying at a different hotel in Seoul, and could the earbuds go there?

The hotel told them it would only release the item to a courier if it had the collection details in advance, so the guest passed those on. A rider collected the earbuds and brought them to the friend's room, and we confirmed when they were at the door. The guest wrote afterwards to say they had arrived safely.

A similar problem happens when a parcel you sent from Korea comes back. An EMS item can be returned because of an address problem, a customs issue, or because no one collected it. It then sits at a Korean post office under the sender's name, and the notice arrives in Korean.

If that happens, keep the tracking number and the sender's details. It has to be collected by or on behalf of the sender, repacked if needed, and sent again with the original problem fixed. We can do that part for you, and it follows the same steps as a left-behind item. Start from the left-behind page.