What to do when an airline website doesn't accept your legal name | Hacker News Reader

What to do when an airline website doesn't accept your legal name

preethamrn.com

95 pointsxmprt127 comments

My legal last name has a space in it and US airlines don't handle this well. Most eliminate the space in internal records, which can break name comparison logic. A common side effect is a broken check-in flow online or at the airport kiosk, forcing me to do it in person with an agent.

Airline IT systems look like a house of cards written in 1970's that everyone is too scared to touch, and this does not seem to be a competitive disadvantage because every airline in this highly regulated market is similarly dysfunctional.

Sabre started around 1960. They still had playing cards back then so we can't go hyperbolic and talk about "house of chicken knuckles" though.

It is pretty amazing how complicated names are if you want them something other than just "your full name as it appears on government ID". Even the casual idea of a "first name" is culturally centered...

> Sabre started around 1960. They still had playing cards back then

Apparently there's evidence of playing cards in Europe from around 1370, which predates powered flight, electricity, the difference engine ... but not double-entry book-keeping (1299).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_game

> something other than just "your full name as it appears on government ID"

Even that is complicated. I have several ids that spell my full name in a slightly different way. They also disagree with each other regarding which part of it is "first" or "given" name.

I have a dash in my last name. Some airlines keep the dash, some drop it and my last name becomes Namename, some convert it to a space so it becomes Name Name. My passport retains the dash and is so far the only travel documentation that does so. Interestingly its never been an issue for airlines (even if travelling with Airline A that drops the dash and Airline B that converts the dash to space, on the same ticket as happened to me recently due to carrier A rebooking an oversold flight segment onto another carrier B). Even self service passport checks is fine despite the passport having a dash and all my flight bookings missing the dash. I suspect all the systems involved just strips all the special characters and spaces and compare that way. So instead of comparing Name-Name with Namename, they just normalise it to NAMENAME vs NAMENAME which matches.

I would check what's encoded on the machine readable zone on your passport, as I understand it, the only valid characters are A-Z, 0-9, and < as a field separator.

In the MRZ, < is not a field separator; it's a filler character. So if you're Lisa Marie Presley (and "Lisa Marie" is your first name) then you probably have "PRESLEY, LISA MARIE" in the VIZ (human-readable part) and "PRESLEY<<LISA<MARIE" in the MRZ.

Indeed, the dash in my name becomes a < in the machine readable part. The field separator is indeed double <<.

I’m the second of my name. Legally lastname II.

My airline tickets always print lastnameii

I don't even have spaces or punctuation in my names, but certain US airlines will inexplicably truncate my middle name in half and append it onto my first name, so my boarding pass ends up with "LAST FIRSTMID" printed on it. Fortunately I've never been stopped for it; I'm sure they see it all the time.

I don't think that's actually an error, that's just how they print boarding passes.

But it doesn't happen with every airlines, and when it _does_ happen my name appears that way in all of the electronic contexts too (e.g. when viewing the reservation online, in the email confirmation, etc.).

My USA passport put a space in my last name (that isnt on my birth certificate). It only ever seems to matter in China, however.

Falsehoods programmers believe about names: [https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...]

There are many variations out there (any authoritative?)

> There are many variations out there (any authoritative?)

No, believing there's an authoritative list is one of the falsehoods programmers believe about falsehoods programmers believe about names.

Coming soon:

“Falsehoods programmers believe about authoritative lists”

1. They exist.

2. If a list calls itself authoritative, it is.

But is an Authoritative list of non-authoritative lists that lists itself authoritative?

3. Authoritative lists cannot contradict each other.

3. Authoritative lists cannot contradict themselves.

This list is great, but what I find missing in these discussions is what to do about it.

And the answer is: if at all possible, only use a name for display purposes. Use a username, a UUID, or some other appropriate unique identifier that you can control the semantics of for absolutely anything for which you might need to assume any property whatsoever.

If you can avoid having a name, don’t even try to collect one. If you need one, it should be a single freeform text input accepting an arbitrary-length and arbitrary-content UTF-8 string. Persist that string exactly as you receive it. Perform no operation on that string other than rendering it.

That isn’t perfect but it’s as close as any of us can reasonably get as things stand today.

I like to add a 41th rule to this list: "There exists a right way to handle names that does not make any incorrect assumptions."

That, unfortunately, isn't always possible. Sorting a list of people by their names alphabetically is a fairly reasonable thing to ask and in many places, it is expected that names will be sorted the surname, whether or not it appears first. This by itself requires breaking rules 18 and 20, but we may not be able to opt not to do it.

The hard problem is not what to do in the ideal case: the hard problem is figuring out how to handle names in a way that minimizes friction if requirements force us to make some such assumptions.

It's fundamentally impossible to sort lists of people from different cultures, because collation differs.

Say you have the last-names 佐藤 (SATO) and 中村 (NAKAMURA). In Japanese, collation is based on the kana sounds, so 佐藤 -> さ (SA) and 中村 -> な (NA). But the 五十音 (gojuon) ordering of the kana has さ before な, so 佐藤 should be before 中村.

Good luck attempting to do a culturally-neutral ordering of 佐藤, 中村, SALMON and NABARRO - someone is going to be confused.

I’m missing “Everyone has a first name and a last name” on the list. Collegues from India certainly do not always appear to have a first or last name.

Or I’m missing something about formatting. French last names are always written UPPERCASE it appears. Funny side-effect is that if a French company takes over a Dutch company, after the integration, all last names of the Dutch are also in uppercase.

I once tried to open a bank account in Spain, which could not be done because I did not have a second last name. Spanish babies receive the last names of both parents.

The employee was trying her best and I eventually suggested she could put my last name twice. She made a face for an instant then said she was not allowed to do that.

I later understood that the face was because having two identical last names suggests inbreeding or incest... I am sure there are plenty of jokes about that in Spanish culture. lol.

I never managed to open the account and in the end had to go to a different bank.

I’m assuming in this case you do have a middle name that could be your first second name, right?

That isn't typically allowed. Spanish people also can have several given names, but they count as first names, not last names/surnames. A bank would typically check your data against a passport or ID and wouldn't allow you to put the middle name in the place of a last name.

And if for some reason you managed to do it, you would be called Mr. MiddleName in all communications.

As a curiosity, Spanish people often have the opposite problem - for example, in academia, if we sign papers in the "natural" way (FirstName FirstSurname SecondSurname) we'll be indexed as Name F. SecondSurname, which is quite jarring for us because we typically go by the first surname, not the second. So many (probably most) of us hyphenate (FirstName FirstSurname-SecondSurname) to avoid automated systems (or humans from other countries) to extract our surnames wrong.

No middle name, just first name last name.

What is actually a "middle name"? I have two "first names" meaning I can use either one I like, and in official situations I write them both in the first name field with a space (which works fine as such, airlines will combine them no issues whatsoever). What is the real life usage of a middle name in whatever culture has the notion of a middle name?

when your mum's angry at you and needs to make it known

It is an other fun cultural context. I have Firstname Middlename Lastname. This or Lastname Firstname Middlename appear on somethings like credit card, ID, passport and official legal documents. But in normal live like receiving normal letters and so on it is just Firstname Lastname or Lastname Firstname. Even the order is fluid with Lastname Firstname being more formal.

And then some people have First-Name firstnames where either part is also a name, but whole thing is one Firstname... So calling someone with just First is often wrong...

Okay but is there any social situation where calling you by the middle name is the appropriate way? Except when you mom's angry like the other commenter suggested :) Is a patronymic a middle name, or a second (first, actually) last name?

Having two identical last names is very common in Spain, for purely combinatorial/statistical reasons. No one bats an eye about that. It would only suggest inbreeding if they were extremely uncommon last names.

I bet she just made a face because the second surname is part of people's identity and has a meaning, it's not something people would fake. And it's also used when e.g. checking your ID to see that you are the legitimate owner of the account, so it probably wouldn't even work.

Of course it's totally reasonable that you suggested that in that case, what's unreasonable is the bank's system requirement of two last names, but to an average Spanish person it sounds odd to want to use a second surname that isn't real.

I know a person who has some certificates to the name of Firstname Lastname NULL :)

It says there are 6 people with my last name in Spain, guess you can call it uncommon :p

banks are always asking for your mother's maiden name, and you refused only in this one case where it actually made sense to give it?

No, names needed to match my ID document, which only has first name and last name.

I don't think she made a face because of incest, two people can have the same last name without inbreeding, just think how many Smiths or Johnsons are in the US.

3.48% are called García in Spain [1], and there are regional differences, in some areas it could be higher, so statistically, there will be García García (in fact, in my 8 months living in Spain, I met one).

Only reason I can think of is that she thought of it as forging a document with fake data, and you so openly suggesting identity fraud, she made a face, but she then probably understood that you are a "naive" foreigner and that you were probably not aware that you just suggested giving a fake name for a bank.

Btw, I have only one first name and one last name, and I could open a bank account without issues in Spain.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_Spanish_surna...

On a related anecdotal note, one of the many reasons my peers aren’t changing their names when they get married is because it’s a huge administrative pain to track down every database you touch and get them to change things.

I always think of the ever relevant “Falsehoods Programmers Believe about Names” [1]

[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

Reading such stories always reminds me of taking the TOEFL test. At least at the time, their website was full of all sorts of warnings and threats about what would happen if you registered with a name that did not match the legal name on your ID. Yet their website did not let me enter the letter "ä" in the name field.

What makes this all the more puzzling is that TOEFL is presumably aimed at people who are not native English speakers, so you would expect all sorts of non-ASCII characters to be fairly common.

Try living in Japan, where you're generally forced to use the name in your passport, including any middle names included (with space) in given name.

Meanwhile a typical Japanese name is no more than three characters each for family and given names, but someone with a western name will have several times that, complete with spaces. And of course most of the companies running various websites and computer systems don't care, because foreigners are a single digit percentage of the market. If you're lucky you can use a separate but equal foreigner flow with fewer features available. (I am looking at you, JAL Mileage Bank and your SEVEN character family+given name limit!)

It is typically possible to circumvent this using paper systems, but that's a particular shame -- one of the nice points about online computerized forms is that it is easy to send them back and forth through browser integrated machine translation which can make them vastly easier to fill out.

Same is true in China. I never use my middle name in other contexts, but it has to be written down in Chinese paper work next to my given name. My family name has a space in it on my US passport that breaks a lot of computer systems in China.

> I was able to book my flight with the credits. I still don't understand how they were able to when I wasn't.

(speculation) the customer support person on the other end of the line likely has multiple windows open containing terminal applications. With terminal A they directly create a booking record in the booking mainframe, filling in some code indicating "booking paid with points". With terminal B they pull up your balance in the points mainframe & manually enter a deduction.

Yep, either Sabre or Amadeus console with cryptic two-letter commands and macros

Adding to the chorus of woes, my legal first name is Paul and middle starts with A and often the ticket comes out as "Paula". I have had at least two heated encounters with gate attendants saying the ticket could not possibly be mine because I don't look like a "Paula".

I got business cards made that politely explain why my appearance may not match their expectations based on my name, and that has been quite effective at diffusing such problems.

In my SaaS software I made the conscious decision to record names as "full_name" (e.g. Mary Smith) which is basically your legal name and then "short_name" (e.g. Mary) which is what I would address a letter to.

This handles a whole bunch of issues with people who have just one name (which I believe is high status in some cultures) and cultures where the family name is first and then the given name.

I have had very little issues with it - even though most customers expect first_name and last_name.

I had a police officer talk to me about my software and they were mucho impressed about how this naming system handles all the different name types. They say some of their system have issues all the time with some names.

Is it a perfect system? No, but it seems to be one of the better ones.

I'd like to do that, but our software has to integrate with a ton of different other SaaS software which often has dumb first/last splits, so the dumb business logic often oozes across.

Do you ask users for both? i.e. "please enter your full name", "please enter the name by which you'd like us to call you"

Exactly, but you can try to default the second one (using the same algorithm you’d use to generate “first name” unreliably).

And then there's sometimes a need for a "sort name" value. When I have upstream data consisting of separate first name and last name fields, my function to generate a sort name is to concatenate last name and first name, and then keep only letters. That way, apostrophes, dashes, spaces, etc. don't influence sorting whatsoever.

It seems quite tricky to deduce a sort string when you're only storing full name and short name... should the user be asked to provide this?

Why wouldn't you just accept the entire thing as a Unicode string and use the culture-free Unicode Collation Algorithm?

Because then you are sorting by the first name, and most people in Europe/America do not expect list of names to be sorted like that.

I don't mean to ask about or promote any particular sort algorithm. Rather, I'm discussing the transformation of a name into a "sort string," which will then be sorted (the algorithm you mention being a fine choice for this) after said transformation. Given discrete first/last fields, the transformation I mentioned works well for my purposes, but if I didn't have those particular discrete fields (instead having full/short fields) then it would be quite difficult, likely needing the user to weigh in, which I think is an atypical UX.

I do!

The join form says:

- Your full name (e.g. Mary Smith)*

- Your short name (e.g. Mary)*

And I have placeholder text in the inputs with "Mary Smith" and "Mary".

My demographic is skewed to be about 70% female hence the female name example.

If you want to really do it right, so it works for everyone, this is the only way.

However, when I actually did it this way, it caused problems as soon as we partnered with another company and had to communicate with a system designed in a less-progressive manner. (I.e., about 99.5% of existing systems.) We couldn’t generate an export for that partner without first and last name fields, and we had no way to reliably generate those from the full name field.

So, ironically, if we had let the user decide how to compromise the integrity of their name up front, we would have had a better user experience than after our computer started butchering it for them.

I guess we just can’t have nice things.

A former colleague of mine, of Polish extraction with a double-barreled surname, also has something like four middle names. His bank in Hong Kong was apparently insistent that all of his middle initials were present on his credit card, but that's too long to fit, so they also reduced his surnames to initials as well. This results in a card printed with something like "A M J W V C-B".

My legal first name is "E". Forms often require more characters. I just add more Es!

Never had a problem, even with three Es.

How's that pronounced? "Eee" or "Eh" or "Nehemiah"... ?

Ah yes, Mr "E".

My legal first name is P, but I add a 'ends' at the end of it to meet the character count.

The British decided that those very common E names must be written as Lee. Remember Bruce Lee?

> TSA doesn't like when the name on my ticket doesn't match the name on my ID (it's illegal)

Not sure how illegal it really is in practice, as my driving license and passport have different spellings of my name and my green card has a different name (I always fly with the passport name but use my DL (not "RealID"!) to get through TSA). This mismatch has been true for 35 years and I have never had trouble traveling to/from or within the USA. There is also both a typo and, separately, a different transliteration of my name on my OCI card but I have never had a problem with that either.

The computers are sometimes picky but humans seem to be able to deal. Even countries that are supposedly picky.

I did once have trouble boarding a flight to the USA because of the d/m/y vs m/d/y thing with my green card -- they thought the card would expire within six months and I wouldn't be allowed in. But the various variations of name haven't been a problem.

Airlines are among the worst when it comes to this for some reason. I gave a talk[1] a while back about the problems that occur when programmers introduce logic around people's names, and a good chunk of my stories/examples involved airlines.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfKhY3sAQ9E

I wonder if airlines are no worse than any other organization at dealing with human names, but they're exposed to many more edge cases than the average company, since they're in the business of enabling rapid travel between continents.

I think that's the case. Any other organization is bound to some kind of context with it's own set of arbitrary choices and restrictions, but only restrictions in GDS are "two names both at least one (or two?) letter each, spelled with Latin alphabet, non-case sensitive". Funnily enough, the set of restrictions used by Visa/Mastercard one step later in the process is subtly different.

i don't see how it needs to be any different from pen and paper.

The reason is GDS systems are some of the most atrocious pieces of essential software out there:

https://media.csesoc.org.au/how-bad-it-holds-airlines-back/

TSA doesn't really give a crap about the name. I always put my preferred name on airline tickets, and nobody ever complains.

That'll work, until a petty bureaucrat decides to ruin your day.

This is not true. You can apply for a redress number to prevent future exception handling. The TSA and DHS makes this an easy process, I have helped more than one person through it.

https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/travel-redress...

https://www.dhs.gov/dhs-trip

Until it's the German bureaucrats that ruin your day.

This is an international issue and a national answer doesn't solve it.

For what it's worth my first name is also not accepted correctly (it contains a hyphen) and I never had a problem so far. But every time an airline asks me to put my name exactly as in the passport I cringe.

By my reading of that first link, you're ineligible for redress until TSA has already ruined your day at least once.

Of course, by my understanding of the word "redress," that was already true; but I did click the link.

That aligns with my understanding with how the redress process works. The facial recognition side is getting better, DHS knew who I was and my return flight details returning from overseas today with only taking my photo. No need to present my passport, as my biometrics are linked to my global entry profile (which has a known traveler number you can provide to airlines when booking). I would expect this to be generally available over the next several years.

I was once prevented from advancing through security by a TSA agent due to the first name on my ticket not completely matching my legal first name on my id, even though it was obviously a derivation of my legal name.

The derivation I use of my first name is obvious in some countries and completely unknown in others.

Like how a random Asian security person at an airport might not guess that Dick Wolf is Richard Wolf.

True, but Global Entry and Precheck would.

The airlines commonly (universally) cram a first and middle name together with no space, and this never seems to matter. I know there's a certain degree to which the info that goes to TSA about who you are isn't exactly a match for what's in the airline's reservation system and what's on your boarding pass... to what extent it's that system at work here vs. the name actually not mattering that much isn't really clear to me.

I’m curious how this works with the new ID-scanning machines that no longer require a boarding pass. Maybe there’s some level of fuzzy-matching name/sex/dob?

I assume for TSA Precheck users there’s some lookup that can just grab your KTN from the database from your ID and look up tickets based on that.

Nobody seems to care that I leave my middle name off my tickets and book with a sex doesn't match my ID, even internationally.

Is there a decent modern argument for why names are split across 2-3 fields rather than “here’s a text field. Make your mark in unicode.” ?

Marketing.

“We want to address them by their first name because it’s so much friendlier and personable”.

That’s all I can think of. Not exactly ‘decent’.

That's not hard to do properly though, you can just have a "Full Name" field and a "Nickname" field. Let the user specify how they would like to be addressed informally without baking in any assumptions about how names are structured.

> Let the user specify how they would like to be addressed informally

Also for formally addressing someone, you need a last name split off of the name in many cultures. Can't write "Very honored mister Schmidt, I regret to inform you that..." if you don't have both the information that this Klaus Schmidt identifies as male and that Klaus must be removed for cultural reasons

Nickname sounds like the real solution. Prefix it with "Dear" and let the user fill in the rest, including any mister/misteress/miss/misses they might want -- or not!

Some cultures order personal names and surnames differently. Here in the US, name order is sometimes swapped when a full name needs to be provided: “Last, First Middle” vs “First Middle Last”.

Years ago the Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, requested that he to be referred to as Abe Shinzo. https://thediplomat.com/2020/09/abe-shinzo-or-shinzo-abe-wha...

It has cultural significance and leaks information. People sharing the same "family name" are presumed to be family. Patronymics show in which way people are related (whether or not certain two people are father and child). Some names in some countries also leak gender and sometimes also martial status. Spliting the name into "given name" and "family" name allows people to change family name to signal significant changes (e.g. marriage) happened.

You could of course say it's irrelevant and should not happen, but it's fun and people like this kind of fun.

You could of course go full Myanmar and say "put whatever here and also it's about 70 bucks fee to change it whenever you want to whatever you want", but that opens a host of other administrative problems, as global demographic database luckily is not a thing.

> People sharing the same "family name" are presumed to be family.

If only they had ALTER TABLE people CREATE UNIQUE KEY uq ON people.family_name; back when these things were registered. Most Jansens ("son of Jan") in my country are related only to the same degree that you and I likely are

If you don't have to interface with anything else, it's probably fine. If you have any non-trivial integrations then you'll probably run straight into "but what's the FIRST_NAME and what's the LAST_NAME"?

In some cases, it's necessary for a business rule.

In New York State, you can change your last name when you get married. However, you can't change any of your other names. Also, your choice is limited to some complicated set of rules involving your spouses surname (and former surnames), hyphenation and your pre-marriage surname.

I'm used to situations when systems do all sorts of things to my last name, given that it contains a non-Latin letter.

So far I've encountered such scenarios:

- The system accepts my original last name just fine.

- It says that a last name can only contain Latin letters and thus refuses to accept it.

- It replaces the non-Latin letter with some gibberish.

- It drops the non-Latin letter altogether.

Especially the last two scenarios have lead to some confusing/frustrating situations in the past. For example, not being able to check-in to a flight with the same last name that I entered during the booking process (only using the "transformed" last name worked).

My middle name is "Fabæch". Or actually it's legally part of my first name, probably because the Danish Civil Registration Number was established in 1968 and was at the bleeding edge of what was possible with computers back then. So no field for middle names, so a secondary first name it is. In actual reality it has been passed down my family so that should logically make it a "family name", which would be a last name in usual western name order.

So far I haven't had any real problems, just annoyances. Often when buying something online the page wants me to write my full legal name "exactly as written on the card" - and then promptly refuses my full legal name. I have even had sites saying something along the line of "Validation Error: Invalid name". That's really not a good look...

With airlines they usually tell me to write my first and last name "exactly as written" in my passport, and then refuses to accept the 'æ'. At least airlines have a standardized substitution of 'æ' -> 'ae' and so far I haven't encountered any problems using that. It's also what it says in the machine readably part of the passport, so I guess that is really what they mean by "exactly as written in my passport".

Just another form of discrimination.

This has been an issue with Meta forever, and they haven't really bothered to fix it. They are still harassing people for using names that Facebook doesn't think people should use.

If it happened once... fine, that's a mistake. If it happens for a decade+... it's racism.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/4wbvzg/facebook-is-still-mak...

> Facebook continues to insist that [Native American] names do not meet their name 'standards.' These 'standards' are a direct reflection of what society as a whole deems 'normal.'

1. I wonder what John Paul I or II would have done.

2. Now you know what those who have apostrophe's, al's, ben, ibn, de la, von, etc. have to go through.

3. People in the Indian state of Mizoram don't have last names. Imagine what Southwest and the TSA would do with that.

It's unfortunate that celebrities with odd names are often rich enough that they bypass the problematic flows for regular people with odd names.

Nobody hears about The Artist Now Again Known As Prince being held up at the gate and missing their flight, so there's no corresponding PR backlash that fixes things.

Regarding the John Pauls, they actually had "normal" names, John Paul was strictly a religious designation that they took when they became popes.

It's similar with most celebrities, Lady Gaga is known as Lady Gaga by her fans and the media, but she's "Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta" to the government and other bureaucratic institutions.

Technically true but John Paul the second's legal name was "Karol Józef Wojtyła" and the ó and ł cause a lot of badly made software to break.

> People in the Indian state of Mizoram don't have last names. Imagine what Southwest and the TSA would do with that.

For reference, Mizoram is in the northeast of India. People in some other Indian states, including in the south (where the language and culture are quite different), don’t have last names either. In some cases, they may use an initial (just one letter) that’s derived from the father’s name. In some cases even an initial may not be used (mononym). In visas, the U.S. consulate typically puts a “FNU” or “LNU” in these names, standing for “First Name Unknown” and “Last Name Unknown”, respectively.

Yet within India people are forced to create last names since some specific government issued IDs require that (it’s clear that those were designed by people who didn’t think of catering to the enormous diversity in the country).

I am of mixed nationality and as such have two surnames, typically separated by a dash "-".

The last time I went to renew one of my passports, I was informed that my country eschews using foreign surnames on passports. After insisting, I ended up with brackets "()" on my passport.

Besides being a complete displeasure when travelling, I wonder if there is a reasoning for this policy. If for example some database has values saved in the local language, my foreign name cannot be represented correctly because we do not use Latin script. Thus my foreign name gets omitted, and effectively only is for show.

Does anyone have an idea how certain countries (China, Korea, Japan) deal with this?

In the VIZ (human readable part) Japanese passports have Latinized names; Chinese passports have both Chinese characters and also a Latinized alternate. Both are acceptable according to the ICAO specifications.

Technically anything other than the Latin alphabet is supposed to be transliterated, but I know that (for example) Ö is rendered as-is on Austrian passports; albeit as OE in the MRZ.

As someone with some non A-Z chars in name I feel this.

Have missed flights because of it before.

Cut off name at the special char on the ticket...and then they wouldn't let me board. It's obviously the SHIT system that is the problem here. I'm here, passport and ticket in hand...it's obvious what the issue is by looking at them side by side and seeing the special char. Nope no joy - your name has to be a precise match.

To be fair the culprit here wasn't airline but rather a crappy 3rd party booking site (lastminute). Applied for refund, which I kid you not came to NEGATIVE 7 bucks which they cheerfully announced they'd waive. Thanks Lastminute...a mere 1k down the drain!

Always book on airline's site directly even if more expensive.

It's the same lastminute that has shitty dark-patterned checkout form which shows a confusing confirmation popup with a small print that sneakily adds insurance to your order despite repeatedly declining it, has a broken website and needs an app with a chatbot to modify the order and get that money back.

For 1k with such a clear culprit, isn't that worth suing, like in small claims with self representation (perhaps sitting with a lawyer for 1h to go over what you plan to submit and say)? Or at least talking to a human, since a "refund" of -7 sounds like another computer bug?

tbh I was quite distressed at the time so don't recall exactly how they arrived at -7. I'm guessing it was cost of flight less some bullshit fees that ensure you're never getting your money back.

>small claims

2-3 jurisdictions/countries involved so doubtful. It was such a frustrating clusterfuck that I just walked away in disgust. Airline was saying they can't edit it because its an agent booked ticket. Lastminute says they can't edit it cause its checked in. Spent ~2 hours at their desk (incl lengthy conference call between those two) trying to unfuck this and they still didn't manage a simple edit on a plane ticket. Eventually they announced plane is gone, no more point.

Tried claiming it from insurance...no go...they have a clause saying if your documents aren't in order then no claim. Ticket not in order...claim denied. Fair - I can kinda see that one.

You have a “legal” spelling of your name, likely registered with the government and an airline name. That’s really common. I imagine it’s like that for most of the world’s population. So for the headline, I’d say, you do what everybody else does and enter what the airline accepts. Your passport might even have the correct airline version printed on it.

It’s weird this airline has trouble with spaces in names as every flight I’ve flown with in the last 20 years has asked for first and middle names in the given name field.

I'll see who I can get in contact with. Sorry about this.

My legal given name was only two characters, which is quite common for Chinese. Airport self check-in kiosks rejected me a lot, and my hunch told me it should be my first name causing problem so I changed my legal name. And no more rejections from those self check-in machines.

Reminds me of this story"

Vietnamese name man admits hoax in Facebook battle

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-34918491

GDPR has rules on correcting data and there have been court cases deciding that having the correct name listed is a right under GDPR.

https://gdprhub.eu/index.php?title=Court_of_Appeal_of_Brusse...

Ann Marie and Mary Anne are common names in the US that has space in it. For example, Donald Trump's mother's full name is Mary Anne MacLeod Trump. Her first name is "Mary Anne," which is considered a double-barreled or compound first name.

Ideally websites cater for everyone and are bug free.

But, given a fixed dev time, it's best to build a website that can handle most customers needs, and then give customer service (via phone/email) the admin/power user abilities to deal with the few special cases that the website cannot handle.

So, IMO, the airline here has done everything right.

Except that those special cases often land on the same groups of people. Accented characters, multiple given names, multiple surnames... these are all common for people whose ancestry isn't the US or Western Europe. No driver's license, no permanent address, no social security card... these are all common for poor people.

It's great that admins can fix the special cases, but the fact that they're special cases at all makes life harder for assumption-breakers. An action that took 10 minutes on the Web for Jim Smith living at 11 Place Road might be 3 hours on the phone for Hector Marίa Gonzalez López whose address is a P.O. box. Those hours add up and can really make folks' life hard for no good reason.

Do your users a favor and make as few assumptions about them as possible!

You don't even have to be that far off from the baseline normie to confuse a tech-infested bureaucracy. Being registered at the same address as your parents or having a name ending in a vowel already significantly increases entropy levels.

>it's best to build a website that can handle most customers needs

This is why regulations and standards imposed externally exist. Notably accessibility requirements.

> So, IMO, the airline here has done everything right.

They haven't done anything harmful on purpose. Also, they provide an alternative path (calling their customer service) that works.

During the last decades, companies and government services have reduced human agents as much as possible to reduce costs. However, this type of problem highlights the need to provide an alternative path. A silly bug or requirement omission may harm many people when there is no alternative.

Anectodal example: I live in Argentina, and my father is an accountant. I've heard him say that many times, the systems provided by the AFIP (the equivalent of the IRS in the US) don't allow certain situations allowed by the tax laws. He often says that a bunch of uninformed software developers are doing whatever they want with the Constitution. I cannot stop thinking about our responsibility as software makers.

It seems you're discovered the real meaning of "Code is law".

But really, how can you argue with a computer? Sue the IRS equivalent?

> and then give customer service (via phone/email) the admin/power user abilities to deal with the few special cases that the website cannot handle.

Typically, the problem here is that customer service is unwilling to deal with these special cases, through some combination of:

1. They are too scared to correct the data - e.g. they have been told to follow some poorly-thought-out procedure to the dot and/or they're scared of committing some sort of "fraud" by entering the data sensibly.

2. Although they could handle such cases in their system, the system has to interface with a labyrinth of other systems that can't.

3. They have to use an interface that is essentially the same as the website, with all of its limitations.

For a case like OP's, the worst-case solution is to let the phone agent bypass the system.

Ie. They write a note saying 'let OP onto the plane, their seat is 1A', then mail it to OP.

As far as the system is concerned, OP's ticket may not exist, payment may not exist, flight may not exist, etc. but the note from customer service is enough to get them to their destination.

My legal first name has a space in it ?

Mine has two spaces. xxx yyy zzzzzzz. I'm Chinese. It's not a middle name, all first name

Could try using a unicode space to make the system not recognise it as middle names, if you want to mess with it that is :)

Elon Musk's child's name is X Æ A-12. It is best to not do any kind of validation (beyond check for empty string) on names.

I was curious about the resolution of that and looked it up. Turns out that the child's legal name is first name "X", middle name "AE A-XII", because "Æ" isn't a letter in modern English, and "12" isn't letters at all. So he'll still encounter several of the problems mentioned here (single letter name, hyphens, spaces), but at least not ones with computers systems requiring names be made of letters.

> but at least not ones with computers systems requiring names be made of letters

That hyphen though

Positive reading of the situation: if they get famous enough, as one is likely to with such a father and inheritance, maybe the next generation of programmers is more aware of what their systems should be capable of handling

Alternatively: poor kid, that name is going to be an annoyance without end

>Elon Musk had to change the name of their baby to comply with Californian law

>On the birth certificate, it states that the baby’s first name is “X”, it’s middle name is “AE A-XII” and its last name is “Musk”.

Imagine your last name being Null.

Or Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;--

My legal first name and last name are the same in English. Norwegian airline didn't let me book tickets on their site years ago. When I called their customer service, the solution they provided was to put my first name as "Mr [first name]"... and it worked!

By the way, you seem to be shadow banned, though it is not clear why. This is your first post since your account creation almost 4 years ago, so it's not like you have any history of writing bad posts. I vouched for you to undead your comment.

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