Singapore Airline online booking system only allows 25 characters in the First Name field. What to do if over limit?

Question

I am trying to book a ticket for someone with a rather long first name on their passport. It is basically in this format

[8 characters] [10 characters] [11 characters]

I am unable to enter all the characters into the first name field On Singapore Airline's online form because it has a 25 characters limit.

Above the name fields, it has this link for "tips on entering your name":

I clicked on the link and it shows the following info

I tried to call their office, of course, but the number is practically dysfunctional. I am not able to talk to anyone.

What should I do in this case?

Answer 1

I have a friend who has 4 first names and whose last name is 6 words. No kidding... He solved this issue by selecting 2 first names and 2 words of his last name. That fits in just about any reservation system. And when passing through passport control or airline check-in counters, he points at the 4 words out of the 10 that make up his name.

So far so good. 30 years of international travel, never denied...

Answer 2

if what you call "first name" is separated by spaces in various parts, you just have to fill in the first of that parts (the one 8 characters long) -

I've never booked Singapore, but I myself an "João Sebastião de Oliveira Bueno". Strictily, "first name/last name" or even "first name/middle name/ last name" won't map to it.

So, I just use "Joao" for first name and "Bueno" for the last name, for all my flying/passport involving activities. I've had 0 problems to this date. (Not that I have travelled that much)

(note that I also use "Joao" instead of "João" because computer programmers will often mishandle accented characters, and for travel documentation purposes, the sttriped version just works.)

Answer 3

Assuming they actually do have a passport, the link you mention tells you exactly what to do here.

Expanding on what that links is saying though:

Any passport they have should be an ICAO 9303 (or, alternatively, ISO/IEC 7501-1, which is the same thing) compliant machine-readable travel document, which means it has this covered.

In particular, on all ICAO 9303 compliant documents, there is a machine readable zone (MRZ) consisting of two or three lines of text in the OCR-B font. In a standard passport booklet, this is at the bottom of the identity page. On most passport cards, it’s on the bottom of the reverse face of the card.

The MRZ includes the name of the document-holder, either as the entirety of the third line if there are three lines, or as everything from the sixth character of the first line to the end of the first line if there are two lines. Some special rules get used when constructing this (punctuation other than hyphens is not included, hyphens and spaces are replaced with < (the filler character used in all parts of the MRZ), most diacritical marks are removed, and specific transliteration rules are used when dealing with non-Latin alphabets), but the contents of that particular field in the MRZ should pretty much always be acceptable to an airline as a passenger name when booking a flight.

In cases where you can’t use a full name, the name as listed in the MRZ on whatever travel document you will be using is almost always the correct thing to use.

Answer 4

In the Singapore Airlines contact us page, there is a “Got a question? Chat Now” bubble on the lower right of the screen, have you tried contacting them? I've tried it, but a chatbot replied, but may probably have an actual human during office hours.