We (myself, wife, two year old and eight month old) just returned from a trip to Europe. We bought our tickets with BA points but couldn't fly from YYZ so we flew from/to YUL instead with BA and connected from YUL-YYZ with Westjet.

When picking up our bags in YUL (connecting at LHR from AMS), two of our four checked bags were missing. These two bags had been sent fragile and contained our baby's car seat, backpack, personal items, and several hundred dollars worth of new clothes my wife had purchased.

BA's stance is that we are at the last leg of our journey ("home") therefore we don't get compensation. I know this is contray to the Montreal Convention, and although according to BA we may be home, Montreal isn't exactly home and we still had a connecting flight to make.

Now we're actually home (41 hours later) and there's no sign of our bags yet. I don't want to rip off BA or anyone else but OTOH I would like to see some reasonable compensation for this. Specifically, we have no car seat which makes it difficult to drive anywhere. My questions are:

1. Since we were on the last leg of our journey with BA but still had another, separately booked, flight ahead of us, were were "home" or not? Does it matter anyway since that doesn't make a difference with the Montreal Convention?

2. Should I just buy a new car seat and save the receipt? I could go on and buy a bunch of other stuff but reasonably speaking, that's the only missing item that I "need". This seems fair, balanced, and reasonable to me, as well as being within the guidelines of the Montreal Convention. Ideas?

3. Can/should I push for additional compensation in the form of BA points or something like that? It seems like a good thing to offer as it doesn't cost them much, and they did inconvenience us quite a bit as it's significantly more difficult to deal with lost bags when one has a toddler and an infant...

Thanks for any ideas or comments,
- Andrew.