Blog

Never Lose Your Car Keys Again

blog

Gil is always looking for ways to provide extra benefits for his customers.

Since 2004, Gil has been attaching a numbed tag to both new and existing customer’s car keys.  So if they are ever lost and then found, the keys can be returned to their owner.

We even offer a reward for any keys that are returned.  We pay the reward, not our customer, and we also cover the postage fee for the keys being sent back and we send a big thank you certificate to the nice person that returned the keys.

We have received keys back from Adelaide, the Gold Coast, The Northern Beaches and Victoria where customers lost their car keys while on holiday.

At the time of writing this blog we have already reunited 240 customers with their lost keys.

On the face side of the tag is a unique number… no two tags have the same identifying number.  On the other side of the tags is our Gil Auto phone numbers.

If the customer has other members of the family we supply them with enough tags to cover their keys also.

Yes this is a completely free of charge service and includes the reward for keys returned… which we pay.  This system has worked amazing so far!

240 returns at the time of posting this blog 22/04/2024
240 returns at the time of posting this blog 22/04/2024

Examples of how people have lost their keys

All of these success stories are dependent on some kind person taking time out of their busy day to help somebody they don’t know.

  • Walking the keys fall out of their pocket or hand bag
  • Forgotten in taxi cab
  • Sat down on a park bench, unpacked their lunch and walked off leaving their keys on the bench. A passerby called us. Happy ending the owner knew he had lost but had no idea where. He was able to drive home that night.
  • Exited the car in a hurry, locked the car and left the keys in the car. A kind Samaritan called us worried that the car would be stolen called us. We called the owner got the two of them together for the hand over.
  • Exercising on a morning run the strap holding car keys strap snapped. Yes the system really works.
  • A lady left her bag on a vendor’s able at Paddington markets on a Saturday. We got a call from the stall holder on Monday. She Hand delivered it back to us because the keys were in the bag. The bag contained several hundred dollars. While all the finds are good stories this one stands out.
  • An elderly person who no longer drove of owned a car had kept the Gil Auto tag on their home keys. She lost them while shopping. Fortunately they were found very shortly after they were dropped and the finder called us straight away. The keys and owner were reunited within an hour. This was a really fortunate. The holder of the spare keys was away from Sydney at the time which would have resulted in her having to call a locksmith.

The tags are made of plastic on to which the number is printed. Some people have large numbers keys on their bunch of keys. This can on occasion, result in one of two things happening. The number gets erased or the plastic brakes in half. The result is that we can no longer se the unique number. Looking at the keys we can identify the brand of the vehicle.

We then draw out from our database all our customers who own that make of car. We send a text to all these customers telling them a key has been handed in, and should they have lost their keys to please contact us.  This works every time.

What is so nice from our point of view apart from getting another very happy customer is the large number of emails we get from other customers complimenting us for taking the trouble to sending out the group txt.

Whenever keys are found and sent back to us, we send the following certificate with a cheque covering the reward and postage and we also include a tag for their own keys.