A holidaymaker was left distraught after the airline she was travelling with lost a bag containing her waterproof prosthetic leg needed to enjoy her break.
Emily Tuite, 26, was forced to spend almost the entire trip to San Diego calling up Allegiant Airlines in the hope that her custom-made medical limb could be found.
She checked in her bag at the airport on September 1 ahead of the flight and was planning to use the device for beach activities such as swimming in the Pacific Ocean. Without it she cannot even stand up in the shower.
It was not until 12 days later on September 12, once her holiday was over, that Emily's bright blue bag with her expensive item in it was returned.
She told Texan news station Austin KXAN that she spent almost every day of her eight-day trip "stressed" and "worried" while trying to find out information on her missing luggage from Allegiant.
Emily, from Texas, added: "I couldn't believe that it took 12 days to get my medical device back.
"I was like I need to do everything in my power to get the bag back somehow, so, yeah, I did a lot to get there."
She also told of how it can take more than one year to make the prosthetic leg and the problems "with insurance" to have such a device remade.
An airline representative told her at one point that the bag never even made it on to the flight from Austin, despite being given a tracking number for it, which led Emily to believe that it must have been stolen.
She told the Mail that her experience of dealing with Allegiant was "traumatic" due to the amount of time she spent speaking to its staff.
According to Emily, the airline never called her back after promising to do so and she described it as "near impossible" to contact them.
She eventually received a call from Allegiant saying her bag had been located and had been mistakenly tagged with another passenger's information.
The valuable luggage had been sitting in a baggage claim in Provo, Utah the whole time.
Emily said: "So they were calling that person saying, 'We have your bag,' and that person was saying, 'It's not mine,'
"Meanwhile, I'm frantic, panicked, thinking that my items are gone, like just stolen from the airport, so I really learned a lesson for sure about flying and tracking your stuff."
An Allegiant spokesperson said the airline gave Emily a $60 dollar refund to cover her baggage fees.
They added: "In addition, we kindly asked Ms Tuite to submit receipts for compensation and processing."
Emily asked the airline to refund the cost of her flight, which she said they declined.
She said she felt frustrated by the lack of compensation after her holiday was ruined by spending most of it trying to contact the airline.
Emily has now decided to now take her waterproof prosthetic leg as a carry-on item on planes, despite its heavy weight, and avoid any more distressing experiences like this.
But as a disabled person, Emily noted that she does not always want to carry her device constantly around.
While for any more holidays, she will buy Apple AirTag devices so she can track the luggage herself.
Emily was unsure why they labelled her bag incorrectly but that this mishap both impacted her trip and her trust in future trips as someone who needs to fly with a medical device.
Emily is not the only holidaymaker to have suffered from their luggage being lost during the summer.
Earlier this year a family's first holiday in three years turned into a nightmare when their bags were lost twice on a trip from Dublin to Venice with Lufthansa Airlines.
While a man said his trip was "ruined" after he was left with only one outfit for nearly a week when his luggage was lost during a TUI holiday to Cancun in Mexico.
