Walk a mile in a customer's shoes they said

 And so I did... because I AM the customer. 

Background:

I flew SEA-BA- LHR-AY-HEL-AY-RIX in J class (except the final leg which was on an all Y ATR-72.

The flights were all listed as British Airways https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways (a subsidiary of IAG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Airlines_Group  but flown by BA, AY (Finnair - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnair)  and NORRA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_Regional_Airlines respectively.  I kept my bag with me at all times. (BA in Seattle wanted to take the bag from me). BA's local ground handling agent was WFS. https://www.wfs.aero/ - itself a subsidiary of Singapore SATS. https://www.sats.com.sg/ (Are you following so far?) were acting like bag Nazis.

On the last leg In Helsinki - I chose to check the bag

as it was an ATR72 aircraft and it would not have fitted in the overhead bin.

Yes I received a bag tag and it would have made it. I watched with anxiety as they did not load the aircraft which was in full display before I boarded. 

To my surprise. I received a message as I landed in RIX.

But on the off chance they were wrong. Sure enough my bag appeared correctly. Happily I ignored the message. But sure enough Finnair is relentless.(Actually this is good but let's continue with the saga).

I received another message from Finnair. But this time labelled as an airline called "XS". 

So I thought I would check to see who is airline "XS".

 

Those of us who have been around for a long time know who SITA is. https://www.sita.aero/ 

So dutifully i want to respond back to Finnair and tell them I did indeed receive the bag. But Finnair doesn't want to hear what I have to say... they want to follow procedure.

As you can expect it would not let me continue. But here is the sequence of screens that I went through.

 

 

 

At this point - one realizes, the whole exercise is down the wrong path.

So what are the learnings on this? BETTER TESTING. WALK that mile. And next time when you send a useless mail to a customer make sure that it does what you intend it to do. 

Thanks! 

Postscript... here is the follow up mail.