Airline reservations require name to exactly match passport, but won't allow entering name that way

Question

My sister's name on her passport is 25 characters not including spaces: 5 letters for her given name, 7 letters for her middle name, and 13 letters, including a hyphen, for her last name. (It's NOT a hyphenated name in the usual sense of one half coming from one spouse and the other half from the other spouse: some benighted ancestor of her husband's chose to spell his last name with a hyphen, and his hapless descendants have been fighting with bad form/database designs ever since. This is important because people's default reaction of using one half or the other when the whole thing won't fit results in a name that might belong to somebody on the planet, but it sure doesn't belong to my sister or any of her relatives.)

She was just trying to book a flight, and the website had the usual warning about "your name on the booking must match the name on your passport". It also had, in smaller letters, a statement that "names cannot contain special characters", and in the list of disallowed characters was, guess what: a hyphen. Rock, meet hard place.

After the usual round of cursing (this is not the first time That Dratted Hyphen has caused trouble), my sister went ahead and entered her name without the hyphen. Hit submit, form comes back all red with the error message: maximum total name length is 20 characters. What the hucking fell?

Other than wishing the designers of that website a slow, tortured death in the lowest depths of hell, what can my sister do in such a case? If she leaves off her middle name and omits the hyphen, her name will definitely not match the one on her passport, but that's basically what the website is forcing her to do. Will the airport staff (in China, just to complicate matters) know that "First LongLastname" is roughly the same name as "First Middle Long-Lastname"?

Answer 1

Many of the systems involved in air ticketing have been around for 50 years or more, and definitely show their age as you've seen...

The good news is that these restrictions are very well known, and there are standard ways to work around them.

• The Hyphen. This one is simple - just leave it out. ABC-DEF and ABCDEF are treated as exactly equivalent according to the rules. The fact the passport has the former whilst the ticket has the latter is NOT an issue.

• The length. Presuming the issue here comes down to the middle name only, then the easiest is to simple leave it out. Whilst the name on the ticket must match the passport, than requirement does NOT apply to the middle name which can be either omitted completely, shortened to a single initial, or shortened to the number of characters require to meet the maximum length.

eg, if the middle name was Jonathan, then all of "" (ie, nothing), "J", or "Jonat" would be considered valid.

Note that at Check-in there will almost certainly be different requirements. Depending on the countries being traveled to/from/through, you may need to provide the full name, including middle name. If this is required, you will be able to enter it on the airlines website in advance (often under the heading of "APIS"), at online check-in, or at the airport check-in.

Answer 2

I had a French client who had four first names, and a last name that spanned six words (three last names from noble families). 45 letters give or take without counting the spaces. So for both everyday interactions and things like airplane bookings, he cut that down to two first names (#1 and #4) and his "last" last name, a noble "de XXXX" thing. Something like Jean Marie de Chose (not the real name).

As you can imagine, airline staff and immigration officers had a fun time trying to match his passport ID page to his booking/boarding pass. Especially in Asian countries, where people are a little less familiar with the Latin alphabet and/or European names. His English was also very limited, so when problems happened (every single time), he would point one by one at the four words, first on the booking or boarding pass, then on the passport. Usually that ended with the staff saying "Ohhh Ohhh OK", and that was it.

I suspect your sister will be okay. Airlines know their antiquated systems aren't always up to handling odd names. As long as the front-line humans are satisfied, it's ok.

Answer 3

My surname is not uncommon in The Netherlands where my parents come from.

While I’ve always had to go to extra lengths to make sure my name is as correct as possible in official documents, I have never even had the hint of a problem when traveling.

My airline tickets often show me as THART C MR, yet that’s apparently close enough to my real name that it has never caused me any problems at all: I have never even be asked about it.

Answer 4

We had the same issue with my indian husband with 3 words of 40+ characters on the last name. This was dependent on the airline but our travel agent told that there is some specific comment field, that only the airline employees (and maybe travel agents) can fill where the whole name was listed. Into the main system the name was put without spaces and with abbreviation of the last last name. My own name containing the european dotted letter ä was always written as teletype (ä -> ae) as is in the bottom part of the machine readable area of the passport. I think that is your hint with what they might compare the "exactly as in passport".