The British Airways lost luggage farce deepened last night when it emerged that the airline is sending thousands of bags out of Heathrow to be sorted through in Milan, only for them then to be sent back to England.

Heaps of the baggage are being sent to cheap sub-contractors in Italy to be sorted - and some of the luggage despatched there is then being sent on to its owners' destinations after the passengers have finished their trips and returned home.

BA also admitted the true scale of the baggage shambles last night, saying that an astonishing 28,000 customers had lost luggage over the last three weeks. The crisis began when a baggage belt broke at Heathrow in mid-December, was compounded by fog problems, and another baggage belt broke on December 29.

And the arline was forced into an embarrassing climbdown yesterday after the Daily Mail revealed BA was profiting from every call made to its baggage helpline, with some customers holding for ten hours and paying 3p a minute for the privilege. The company belatedly introduced a free phone number yesterday afternoon...

...I am so happy to have the BA operation called a "shambles." Yes, I did get my suitcase back last Sunday--seventeen days, but it looked like it had seen some very hard traveling. It was really dirty, ripped in one place, and bizarrely repacked (maybe it was subjected to an extra security check). Stuff that had been safely inside the bag (a bunch of my nice, dress-up clothes) were damp, balled up and stuffed into an outside pocket. One white silk shirt actually has black boot prints on it which a dry cleaner has not been able to take out. The other clothes were resuscitated by the dry cleaning. But their customer service is the absolute worst. I got the best customer service in Israel where people at Ben Gurion answered the phones and were nice and as informative as they could be, but when I got back to the US I was never able to speak to a human being. BA had these phone-trees-to-nowhere they would put you on, or 800 numbers that were always busy or just endlessly played music. One time, at about day sixteen, after the new year when things must have been calming down, I waited listening to Muzak for 45 minutes and then got a human being. He said he couldn't tell me anything and didn't know anything about baggage because he was in reservations. He said throughout the holiday baggage calls were routed to reservations so if I tried again the same thing would happen.

So I've sent in a claim for the silk shirt, the dry cleaning and the calls I made from the Daniel Hotel. I think it's probably wise to try to avoid flights that connect in Heathrow. I did a lot of reading about it over the holidays and it seems it's kind of straining at the seams with overcrowding--too many flights coming through...

...I spent 26 years with a major American oil company, about seven of which were in various auditing positions. I can attest to the accuracy of this, as I heard it directly from the person involved.

One of our engineers had been assigned to an offshore facility in Egyptian waters, near Saudi Arabia. Because of hostilities during the Yom Kippur War, all of our personnel were ordered to vacate the drilling facilities, and leave the area. He was among the last to leave, as his team was in charge of shutting the rigs down. He was booked on a British Airways (then known as BOAC) flight back to London, and from there, an American carrier back to the U.S. He was very surprised to find that he was the only passenger on a 747 from Riyadh to Cairo to Heathrow. This was due primarily to the Yom Kippur War, as passenger traffic was restricted.

A flight crew of 5 or 6, and a total of twelve cabin attendants gave him what he described as the most personal service he had ever received an any flight. He said he felt like royalty, and was almost disappointed when he arrived in England, and went back to being treated like any other commoner. This feeling was was reinforced when he was informed at Heathrow that his luggage had been 'mishandled', and could not be located. He told me that it took three additional days for his bags to catch up to him in New York. We could never figure out how the luggage could be lost, as he was the only passenger, and his were the only bags in luggage compartment...