Lost and found: Passport, check. Bags, check. Got the snake?

Snails, a snake and a hidden stash of $10,000 in cash were all among the items discovered (Rex Features)

If you're someone who has left a phone, a tablet or a laptop in a hotel room, you're not only not alone, but you're also refreshingly normal.

A new survey has discovered that 23 per cent of hotels reported an increase in such items left on their premises, while 11 per cent of European hotels said they had seen an increase in both sex toys and drugs that boost bedtime performance being left behind by some (presumably) exhausted guests.

The lastminute.com report became even more bizarre when they asked hoteliers to list items that had been left by guests. Some of them sound like left-over ideas from the road-trip film The Hangover. Snails, a snake and a hidden stash of $10,000 in cash were all among the items discovered.

The survey also threw up some more personal stories. If you feel sorry for the police officer who left both his badge and his gun in a Las Vegas room, his telling-off is unlikely to be anything like as bad as that of the man in Dublin who left alone after forgetting that his mother was also staying with him. And she was perhaps less annoyed than the wife of the businessman who left her in a Prague hotel, while he hurried off to the airport.

There isn't even a mention of the worst kind of hotel-room discovery: the dead body. Whatever it is they are paying maids, it's not enough.