My younger daughter and her fiance recently returned from a three-week trip to Italy. Months in the planning, it encompassed stops in Milan, Florence, Venice, Cinque Terre, Rome and the Amalfi Coast. Jenny and Josh represent the demographic travel providers want to tap into: professional, well-educated millennials whose discretionary income primarily goes to travel. Josh travels a great deal for business, and Jenny has been an international traveler since high school. Both research their destinations and options thoroughly and know how to use all the digital tricks and technological advances to their best advantage.

For this odyssey they saved and purchased miles to book business-class tickets on British Airways. Some accommodations they booked through Airbnb, they booked exclusive tours to avoid crowds and long lines at the most popular sites and attractions, and they even managed to get reservations at two restaurants on the “Best in the World” list. They developed a detailed itinerary and were ready to hit the ground running when they landed in Milan for the first leg of the trip . . . except to discover (say it with me) their luggage did not make it with them.

British Airways could not initially even tell them where the bags were. Alaska Airlines, which flew the couple from Portland, Ore., quickly responded to queries and confirmed that the bags had been turned over to BA in San Francisco, but BA, over the course of the next 10 days, failed to convey much in the way of concern or urgency in providing help in tracking down the wayward bags. Jenny’s bag was actually found early on the day after their arrival, but it didn’t make it to their hotel until midnight — after they were promised it would be delivered at 11 a.m. Most of Jenny’s friends said, “Hey, too bad, you’re in Milan and the airline will pay for replacement clothes . . . go crazy!” That would be fine for her, but Josh is 6’5″ tall; finding clothing for him proved a time-consuming major challenge. And, as it turned out, it would take seven days before BA found his bag (plus 17 phone calls and hours of frustration for Josh and Jenny) and another three days before they got it to him in Florence. (For some reason, they couldn’t get the bag from Milan to Cinque Terre — a three-hour drive — and waited to deliver it in Florence.)

Since their return and the submission of all their paperwork for reimbursement, the two have received a check from British Airways covering the clothes and toiletries purchased, the extra suitcase they needed to buy and the cost to ship it and the extra clothes home via Fed Ex. That’s the bright spot in the saga. Jenny acknowledges that luggage can go astray (although I think she’d hoped that with priority-checked bags it would be less likely), but her biggest beef isn’t with the lost bags but with the casual indifference with which she felt they were treated by BA’s customer service team. The incident threw their vacation into disarray as they altered plans as they waited for deliveries that didn’t arrive when promised, scrambled to find appropriate clothing (never sure how much to buy for an indefinite time frame) and spent precious time on the phone when answers weren’t forthcoming from the airline.

This young couple plans a long future of travel together, but after this experience, I don’t think they’ll be flying with British Airways any time soon.

— Patty Vanikiotis, associate editor/copy editor