From my wife:

And the saga of the missing bag has been solved!! 👍👍👍

After checking the Turkish Lost and Found Ap at least a dozen times a day and receiving the message, ‘Please Check Later’ for the last two weeks… a miracle has occurred!

Yesterday John got a What’s Ap message from Ruth S. I think she is Israeli passenger who also had lost bag. She had been in a Missing Bag room at Ben Gurion airport. This room is airside. While searching for her missing bag, she looked at other bags and photographed them including the broken tag on my bag. This label stated John’s contact details. She What’s Apped him with a photo of my bag!! And told him exactly where it was.

So when I woke up this morning, I got the great news!! Ruth even sent my a hand drawn picture of where she had seen my bag in relation to the room!

Danny collected MR and I and we made our way through the chaotic traffic to the airport.

The Lost and Found place was as unhelpful as ever but Danny finally persuaded someone to take me to the special bag room.

I had to go through major security scrutiny.

The guy led me to the room, then abandoned me. There are thousands of bags in there. They are at least five deep and line a full wall, door to door. I could have helped myself to any bag!

I finally located my bag on the back wall. I had to manoeuvre several bags to manipulate mine to the front. Then I wheeled it out of the room and through Customs and out!! The entire process probably took ten minutes! I wouldn’t be surprised if my bag had been sitting here for most of the last two weeks.

I am so grateful to the stranger, Ruth, that so thoughtfully contacted John. And to John for hounding Turkish Airlines who were in the end quite useless. And to MR who had to put up with me for two weeks without my bag!!

It’s very sad the think of all those bags that contain people’s special belongings, are just placed into a forgotten room.

Turkish Airlines made no effort to find the bag, despite demanding and receiving copies of my ticket, passport, boarding cards, bag tags, a missing bag report and a full list of the contents. This is not the easiest to do on a mobile phone!! They don’t answer the phone, nor reply to email and when I tried to visit to their office in Ramat Gan, entry was refused. It really is quite disgusting.

The moral of the story is take carry on bags only.