Alexanders in the Mediterranean: Lost Luggage

Jessie had a challenge at the Vancouver airport since her flight to the UK was July 2023 and her return flight was Jun 2024. That exceeds the length of time you can stay in the UK without a visa. She was totally prepared and had her follow-on flight to Greece well documented but that seemed to be beyond the Air Canada system’s ability to process. After a harrowing hour in line at the Vancouver Airport, we finally got her checked into the flight. Thankfully we were at YVR with plenty of time to spare so we easily made our flight to Montreal and the connecting Montreal to Heathrow leg. We made it. My bag made it, but Jessie’s bag didn’t. That was August 29th.

Lucky I packed 10 meters of rope to tie that bag to the scooter

After numerous phone calls to Air Canada baggage services (and I use the word service quite liberally here), Jess was assured her bag would be in Preveza on the 31st, but they didn’t know flights to PVK from Heathrow come on Saturday, Sunday and Wednesday.The challenge was that we were not connecting to an Air Canada affiliate flight so Air Canada thought they needed to send the bag to Heathrow, which they did, but it took a while for them to realize that Preveza is in another country 1000+Km’s away and they needed to send the bag on BA to get it to PVK. Well to make a long story short, that did not happen for about a week. We reckon that her bag had a lovely London holiday.

I was really impressed how Jess kept it together after getting the runaround and having to make about a dozen phone calls, many of which included lengthy waits to talk to an agent. Check the website they would say. You mean the website that never is updated? She received information, disinformation, assurances, and disappointment. She finally got a call on Sunday the 6th that the bag was at PVK, so I went and rented a scooter and rode it to the airport to pick it up. When I got there the Greek airport computer didn’t know about her bag (uh oh). The agent who was helping me walked to another computer terminal in the building. I went with her and luckily, I saw the bag sitting there on the floor and said “there it is!”