Brits lose £750k of items in hotels

Holidaymakers visiting hotels belonging to a certain UK chain have left about £750,000 of items in their rooms this year, it has been revealed.

According to Holiday Inn, objects as valuable as a £3,000 engagement ring and a £2,000 Rolex watch were left in rooms at their hotels over the course of 2007.

Stranger items of lost property were found to include a prosthetic leg, a monk's habit, an inflatable sumo wrestler costume and, perhaps most bizarrely, eight posters of television personality Jonathan Ross.

"Some of the items seem beyond explanation - and others make you wonder what goes on behind closed doors," commented Alexi Hakim, UK and Ireland chief operating officer for InterContinental Hotels Group, owner of the Holiday Inn brand.

There are 1,370 Holiday Inn hotels around the globe. The first European branch was opened in the Netherlands in 1967, while the first Holiday Inn located in China was launched in Beijing in 1984.

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