but somebody has forgotten to tell Continental Airlines.

British tourist Miss Esther Williams liked Bermuda so much she wanted to extend her stay by a few days.

She also wanted to stop over in New York to spend some time with her aunt who had been taken ill with cancer.

But what she thought would be a simple task turned into a major headache which ruined a good part of her holiday.

"Four times I called Continental in the US and, on each occasion, I was told I couldn't make any changes,'' she said. "But because I was given a different reason each time I decided to continue trying.'' Since Continental has no offices in Hamilton, the 24-year-old school teacher decided her only option was to go to the airline's desk at the airport.

But she needn't have bothered making the relatively long trudge from her place of residence in Paget. "When I got there I was told `We're just a small Island in the middle of the Atlantic and we don't know anything','' she said.

Not one to be easily put off, she went back to the airport the next day, saw a different Continental representative and finally managed to have her ticket changed.

"The whole experience was exasperating and very frustrating,'' she told The Business Diary .

"All the people I dealt with were very friendly but they just did not have any grasp of what I wanted to do and what I was allowed to do. They seemed to suffer from a total lack of information.

"I was told a different story all the way down the line and, as a result, wasted a good part of my holiday on something which should have taken no time at all.

"Even when I did get the ticket changed, the rep really didn't seem to understand what she was doing. I think she only gave in because I was so persistent.'' It was the second nightmare of Miss Williams' trip to Bermuda, which she combined with a visit to Mexico.

Weeks earlier, she had flown from London to Houston because her British travel agent's travel computer showed she could buy a flight from Houston to Bermuda for less than $40.

When she arrived in Texas, she discovered the hard truth: the flight really cost $900.

*** IN LAST week's Business Diary , we reported on a Four Star Pizza customer who had to wait one hour and 25 minutes for his meal to arrive and asked if this was a record. Not by a long chalk, it seems.

Two tales came in of delivery times of approximately two hours and more. One customer, who is a computer salesman in Hamilton, said: "On one occasion, I had waited well over an hour and decided to ring up to complain. They told me the delivery person must have got lost and said they would look into it.

"The next thing I knew, two pizzas arrived at the same time. The original one finally turned up after the deliverer worked out where I lived.

"The second one was delivered because the pizza firm had assumed the first one would never arrive and had made up another one after I called. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.'' Another Four Star Pizza client, who lives in an apartment in Pembroke which is difficult to find, said he once waited nearly two and a half hours for his meal.

"When it did arrive the delivery woman had a go at me because she had spent ages trying to find my home,'' he said. "I knew her, though, and we ended up having a laugh about it.''