A cruise, a suitcase and 49 days in limbo

You know those nagging bits of travel advice I’m always giving you? Let’s review.

This advice is routinely ignored by millions of  travelers with no ill result. Yet, now and then, the bad luck dial lands on a few unlucky folks.

And trouble, as it usually does, begins with a simple mistake.

 Italian abyss

When Nancy Dwyer of Clinton Township and fiancé  Clement Bowman of Sarnia, Ontario, disembarked from their lovely Celebrity cruise in Rome’s Civitavecchia port, they could not find their largest suitcase.

There was one suitcase left standing at the cruise port baggage claim. But it was not theirs.

Dwyer wrote down the name of the person whose tag was on the lone suitcase, filed a report about their own missing bag, and caught the flight home.

Later, she contacted the person whose name was on the lone bag. He admitted he had accidentally taken their suitcase, realized his mistake and brought it back to the cruise port the same day.

So far, so good.

Except.

Their bag was now missing in action.

“We contacted Celebrity’s lost-and-found department at least every other day,” Dwyer recalls. “We were told the bag had been found, but they had no control over the bag.” Once it left the ship, an Italian government department took over. And for 40 days, it disappeared into the Italian bureaucratic abyss. Dwyer was certain it was gone forever.

Mystery route

Now, in this story, the cruise line is the hero, not the villain. Eventually, Celebrity tracked the bag down and arranged for it to be shipped to Bowman at his home in Canada. They gave the couple a tracking number.

“We tracked the bag to Germany, a weekend in Spain,” Dwyer recalls. “Then we learned it was destined to go (not to Canada) but to Miami and Ft. Myers, to a gated community where we had made the cruise booking.”

Frantically, they tried to get the cruise line to divert the bag to Bowman’s home, and once again, Celebrity came through.

The bag wended its way to Cincinnati and Toronto.

Then more trouble. Canadian Customs was suspicious. Why had this bag been transiting around the world? What was in it? They required Bowman to provide his passport. Customs held up the bag for inspection.

Finally, on June 10, the bag arrived at Bowman’s home. It was delivered by a company best known for transferring money with an armed truck.

Incredibly, all of their things were safe inside, including Dwyer’s laptop computer.

“Forty-nine days after the bag was lost, I now have my laptop and high heel shoes.” Nancy says.

The couple has learned one lesson: Make sure your suitcase doesn’t look like anyone else’s.

“(Our) suitcase was generic black, and it did not have its usual bright yellow strap on it,” Dwyer says. “He now has a red tie on it.”

Contact Detroit Free Press Travel Writer Ellen Creager: 313-222-6498 or ecreager@freepress.com.