This one is such a no-brainer, I can’t believe I’ve never thought about it before. Because if you ever lose anything in a taxi, it’s pretty much as good as gone.
Boarding Area has a pretty simple suggestion for getting ahold of a taxi’s identification: just take a picture of the driver’s registration with your cellphone. It’s less hassle-free than obtaining a receipt—which may or may not even be helpful—which Pearls of Wisdom points out:
You may have a generic paper receipt with just a taxi company’s name. You may have a credit card receipt with no identifying taxi information at all. You may have nothing if you paid cash and received no receipt.
It’s almost as dumbproof as my parents getting lost enough in London that they just got into the nearest taxi and pointed to a picture they had taken of their hotel. Yeah, they did that. (Hey, Mom and Dad: next time just grab the hotel's business card on your way out.)
This is pretty similar to the little bit that Amanda wrote a while back on how you should take a picture of your hotel room number just in case you end up banging up on someone else’s door, proving that pictures once again can be absolutely infuckingvaluable.
Taxis aren’t exactly known for their great return rates. Lookout actually only estimates that you only have a very modest chance (0 to 50 percent) of getting your lost item back. Still a hell of a lot better than, say, losing a cell phone at the bottom of a swimming pool, though.