Toilet horror: How this teenager recovered thousands of holiday snaps after she dropped her phone in an Italian toilet

These days, smartphones are a must for any traveller. According to Cover-More Travel Insurance, it approved more than 11,000 phone-related claims from 2013 to 2016. In 2016 alone, Cover-More received 2,861 phone-related claim cases including cover for items such as damage repair, data recovery or claiming lost or stolen mobile phones.

They are the modern-day Swiss Army Knife for savvy millennials who want to capture their precious memories on their phone’s camera roll while searching for a famous European cocktail bar AND messaging their friends to meet them there for drinks, all at the same time.

But what happens when all your amazing holiday snaps literally go down the toilet as happened to Brisbane’s 18-year-old Shonny Quaid while she was travelling in Italy?

In the case of Shonny, like most 18-year-old travellers, she had her iPhone strapped to her wrist on her first big overseas trip around Europe with her sister.

Two weeks into their adventure the pair had accumulated more than 3,000 photos from their journey – that’s 214 photos A DAY. From eating pasta in Italy to visiting Big Ben in London, they couldn’t wait to share all of their incredible moments with their friends and family back home in Australia.

On the last night of their trip the unthinkable happened while getting ready for a night out in Florence – Shonny dropped her phone in the toilet.

“We were so excited to celebrate how wonderful the trip had been and before I knew it my phone slipped out of my hand and dropped in the toilet, almost as if it was in slow motion!”

Desperate to fix the phone, the sisters scrambled through the streets of Florence looking for a big bag of rice to submerge the phone in; anything that would dry their precious device.

“We didn’t have a lot of time and we weren’t anywhere near a supermarket so after a good half an hour we had to give up searching for rice and finish getting ready to go out. We were determined not to let it ruin our holiday.”




They left for Brisbane the following day, their amazing trip marred by the tragedy of losing all their photos.

“When we returned to Brisbane I went straight to the Apple store where they said there was no way they could fix the phone and to retrieve the photos I would have to go to a data recovery specialist who charged $750. I just couldn’t justify that kind of money.

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