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Comment by protastus | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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