A sad story from Canada, where a man’s trip to Ireland was ruined because he used his nickname instead of his full legal name when booking his airline ticket. I find it absurd that three missing letters cost him his trip, but it is an important reminder to always use your legal name when purchasing airline tickets and to insist that a ticket be corrected should you make a typographical error. An airline ticket spelling error, even just one letter, can end up costing you your trip.
Irish Holiday Ruined After Airline Ticket Spelling Error
Doug Lee planned a trip of a lifetime to Ireland. The Canadian resident booked a ticket for him and his wife to Dublin from their home in Halifax. They planned to join another couple for 10 days in Ireland.
They booked a ticket on Air Transat from Halifax (YHZ) to Dublin (DUB) via Toronto (YYZ), with the first segment operated by Porter Airlines. The trouble began at check-in. Lee’s full name his Douglas, but he put “Doug” on the ticket.
Porter Airlines staff said they could not check him in because of the mismatch. For the next five hours the couple (and their children) frantically worked to correct the error. Porter Airlines could not help. The travel agency they used to make the booking (unknown) claimed it could not help. Air Transat said updated the name on the ticket and reissued it, but Porter Airlines could not see the correction and refused to check-in him for the flight.
So they forfeited the trip. Air Transat did refund the tickets and also promised it is working to create a more seamless information exchange with Porter Airlines to avoid precisely this type of problem. But it also reasonably noted that the booking was made months in advance via a travel agency and that this should have been caught earlier and corrected by the travel agency.
I generally loathe using travel agencies (even online agencies like Orbitz or Expedia) because any little change (like a typo on the name) becomes a major drama to fix. Furthermore, when something goes wrong (like a flight cancellation), airlines tend to push consumers back to their travel agents, creating a needless layer of complexity and wasted time.
When possible, always book your tickets directly. It is rare that you will see a travel agent offering a cheaper price for a ticket.
Always remember that the name on your ticket should match the name on your ID.
The fact that Lee is a senior citizen and a very rare air traveler does not absolve him of the situation. Even so, it sounds like there was no mechanism in place to update a name on the issuing carrier (Air Transat) and push it to the operating carrier (Porter). I would think after all else failed, Air Transat could have canceled the original booking and created a new booking with the right name.
There are mechanisms in place to update your airline ticket if you spell your name correctly. Do not leave it until the last minute…check and double check your tickets and make changes immediately if you notice an error to avoid precisely this scenario.
CONCLUSION
A couple lost their dream trip to Ireland because of three missing letters on an airline ticket. As tragic and unnecessary as I find such a situation, it is a good reminder to always double-check your ticket and book directly with the airline when possible instead of via a travel agency. Hopefully, the Lees will have a chance to return to Ireland next year.
This is a good reminder. One of my friends was denied boarding from Korea to Vietnam because she did not include her middle name on the visa application, The airline actually contacted Vietnam immigration. After waiting for some excruciating hours, Vietnam came back and cancelled the visa.
I don’t always remember adding the middle names for the kids when booking travel. So far it has not caused any problem. In the rare cases when we needed to apply for visa (China is the only one coming to mind), I guess I have lucked out and have filled out the forms correctly.
OMG that’s crazy. I (like many people) hate my middle name. So I never use it, not even the initial. But there it is, on my DL and passport.
“Sexy kitten?” Sorry mam’m….you may not board .
As someone with a suffix on their name, I’ll just note my two thoughts from experience: (1) it is sometimes worth the effort to correct, but much easier said than done; (2) and while this situation is more nuanced (a nickname is not a spelling or data mix-up), shame on Porter Airlines for not resolving this situation.
Suffixes are a nightmare: most US carriers have a separate field for a suffix, but most foreign carriers do not — how that gets translated over is always a surprise. US passports sometimes have the suffix in the surname, sometimes in the first name, field. Does that make it part of the surname? etc.
Or: Book an Avios award on AA and your title appears as a middle name. Names get truncated. Names got combined. And the fact that it’s often partner tickets makes it just the more complicated to try to resolve.
Names are complex, and particularly when booking across partners, there’s just so many ways things get mixed up. Sometimes the traveler is at fault (spelling), sometimes the carrier is at fault (middle name issues, suffixes, etc.). But it’s not hard for a human being to correctly judge whether the passenger presenting the passport is the passenger meant to be on the ticket.
Thankfully, US carriers are *tremendously* lenient with these things, as is the TSA name matching system, and so I highly doubt this would happen with a US carrier as the operator.
As someone with an Irish O’ surname, I know these problems too well. If your name is Jim Bob O’Connor for example, folks will input it as Jim Bob O Connor, Jim BobO Connor, Jim Bob Connor, Jim Bob Oconnor, etc… and the apostrophe if added may be replaced with quotation mark, a comma, a period, a slash, a tilde, etc…
When I lived in Indiana, the state would not allow me to have an apostrophe on my driver’s license. At first I was irritated by this as it seemed similar to the things the English did to my grandparents’ names years ago (there is a long history of the English trying to suppress Irish language going back to the 1300s). Once I realized how many problems it solved for me though– not just airline tickets, basically anything you buy or do online, or with a credit card, or anything in which your last name is sorted by first letter– like picking up dry cleaning.
Now I wish more folks left off the apostrophe!
In Latin America, nobody talks about First Name, Middle Name, Last Name. It is simply your full name. The only place they use First, Middle and Last is in the passport because it follows some sort of international rule. Most people in Latin America have very very long names because they keep all mother names plus all father names into the kids names. I know people from Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, etc… that have over 10 names in their full name. Well, since there is no Middle Name, they end up having a passport with 1 First Name and then 9 Last Names. It is insane!
It’s funny you mention this as I have this problem with Spain. My middle name is my mother’s maiden name but as a North American, that’s not terribly common. Whereas in Spain, this is usually how it’s done but instead of being called a “middle name” it’s “first last name”.
However, because I’m not Spanish by birth, I can’t use my middle name as my “first last name” as indicated on a lot of Spanish documentation despite the fact that, naming-convention-wise, I actually *do* comply with their method of First Name – Mother’s Last Name – Father’s Last Name for naming. So all my Spanish documentation is FirstnameMiddlename Lastname. So far I haven’t run into any issues, but I’m always worried.
That is quite interesting. When the Spaniards colonized the Philippines, that naming convention was apparently was instituted. I thought having your mother’s maiden name as your middle name was a Filipino tradition. My brothers and I all have the same middle name and I continued it with my son. The other tradition is when we married, her given middle name was dropped and her maiden name became her middle name (whish is also my son’s middle name). What throws me is my boarding passes always have my middle initial tacked on to the end of my first name.
What a piece of sh!t that Porter Airlines agent in Halifax was. There’s literally no legal or software reason the mindless $20/h employee couldn’t have just hit the key on his keyboard to print the boarding pass.
Sometimes when you encounter an employee who won’t do the obvious thing, it’s worth asking, “OK, but what happens if you just do it?”
In this case, a “What happens if you just pretended my ID says Doug?”
Sometimes it works, and sometimes you find there really is a “real” reason they can’t do what you want them to do. (In this case, maybe the Canadian equivalent of TSA is going to kick thek back to the ticket counter anyway?)
An acquaintance of mine, and recognizing I don’t know 100% of the situation, had tickets booked on UA Polaris for their daughter’s wedding in Europe (two months ago). Tickets were booked via UA directly. There was a typo in a name. UA refused to fix the ticket and a replacement ticket had to be purchased at the counter. Big $. Still working with UA to get the error ticket refunded, but UA only wants to issue a credit. Guess to who – the name with the typo!
I do IT Support for a rather large chain of in-person travel agencies here in Canada – these type of people trying to save money and do it themselves online are the bane of our existence. A few oberservations:
1. This would not have been an issue if he used a travel agent for the booking instead of trying to save a bit of money and doing it himself. An agent, had they let that slip through, would have moved mountains to fix that for him or rebook him on an alternate flight with no cost to him.
2. Airlines and booking sites make it very clear that you need to use your full legal name when booking airline tickets.
3. Flying all the way back to YYZ from YHZ to then fly to DUB first on Porter to then switch to Air Transit reeks of cheapness and trouble. I’m hoping the lesson he learned is to not book flights himself to save some money
Did you actually read this article? It clearly states, “But it also reasonably noted that the booking was made months in advance via a travel agency and that this should have been caught earlier and corrected by the travel agency”. It also mentions, “The travel agency they used to make the booking (unknown) claimed it could not help”. Clearly, they didn’t ‘move mountains’ to fix this issue.
And, lastly, flying from Halifax to Toronto to Dublin (which was booked using a TRAVEL AGENT) was necessary because there are NO DIRECT FLIGHTS from Halifax to Ireland.
I am sorry but he was extremely naive. Does his passport say Doug? Probably not. Thus, why in the world did he book his ticket under Doug? Now, I have a suffix in my name and that is an absolute nightmare. Most places treat it as two words last name but sometimes fields do not allow two last names. I made sure my kids had the most simple names possible to avoid any issues.
As for using travel agencies? What is that? LOL!
My legal name is Edson Arantes do Nascimento. You can imagine the name issue I have to deal with.
Hahah. You used to be the sports minister of Brazil?
Agree with you but some people just aren’t used to international travel and don’t know these things. You travel a lot, I’m sure. So do I. However a lot of people don’t. 2 of my closest friends had never really traveled much until about 2 years ago and since then have visited 6 countries. Helping them at the beginning – finding best deals, filling out online booking details, etc. – was ‘challenging’. They’re not dumb but they just weren’t used to it which sounds like what happened here.
Just because you have been sufficiently beaten down by an airline travel system supported by layers of archaic software does not mean it is reasonable to expect the average person to know that if fhey put the name they have used for 70 years on a ticket instead of the exact name put on their birth certificate that they are setting themselves up for a world of hurt.
The unreasonable treatment of this passenger is the result of the crappy system they had to interface with, and we shouldn’t blame people for having unreasonable consequences for doing reasonable things.
Are you serious? It is very clear that you have to have a legal form of iD to travel and internationally that is called passport. You don’t have your nickname in the passport.
Hi Matthew,
According to the news article published on CBC News, the travel agency was FlightHub.
Which sounds like an online travel agent where you’re really given a portal to be your own travel agent.
Wow, a lot of bad advice in this column. Travel agents can often be cheaper than the airline directly and allow you to combine airlines and make complex routings. Obviously, there aren’t that many highly skilled TAs but they are out there.
Secondly, most airlines have a procedure to correct obvious spelling mistakes. Most have a policy that one or two characters off is still ok to check in.
I had a travel agent that specialized in routes between LAX and Europe and got me amazingly priced tickets via bulk-purchase prices/vouchers they sold off and, incredibly enough, I still got full FF miles on them! These “tickets” were immutable and I was super careful about the details such as my full passport name on the tickets.
A bit of shame here for the travel agent, though, for not checking whether someone is really named “doug” on their passport or even “Mike”. At work, there’s a guy whose has his email with “mike” on it and I find it interesting it’s not Michael.
Regarding middle names. I’ve been ad-hoc with them over the years but it makes sense to include them in the future. Vietnam were a bit of jerks for cancelling the visas in that the visas include the passport number and no doubt even a front page of the passport when applying.
I often omit my kids middle names in the hope that it’s one less thing I can make a mistake on. Had to pay $10 in Cambodia to change my daughters last name and first name around. Not sure how I managed that on booking.
Years ago I made a booking on Qantas for myself and three mates to fly syd to Mel for the Grand Prix. We were all only 19-20 and I accidentally duplicated my surname onto my friends booking. I rang up within minutes but Qantas wouldn’t let me change it. Had to ditch the ticket and buy a new one. Pretty brutal.
Mind you in australia these days they don’t even check IDs for check-in or boarding so it wouldn’t matter.
That’s brutal indeed.
He should have brought an emotional support animal. That’s when they would have run around bending over backwards for him.
Talking about misspelling… it should be Air Transat (and not Air Transit), the Montreal headquartered leisure oriented airline.
That was auto-correct overworking just once – the airline was correctly spelled five other times.
@Matthew – Kyle could explain some of the benefits of using a travel agent.
I’m not saying it never makes sense, but so often (as is true in this case) tickets can be booked directly instead of with an OTA.
I’ve booked many tickets on OTAs over the years (including recently in order to take advantage of the opportunity for an OTA to void a ticket within 24 hours of purchase even for a close-in ticketing).
But my general advice remains to book directly.
I think that OTAs are the worst possible choice. Unlike ‘traditional’ travel agents who rely on cross-selling, word of mouth etc, OTAs are forced to compete almost exclusively on cost and have to resort to business models which make booking changes complicated and expensive.
I always prefer to book direct, but, where that’s not possible, it is good to have some kind of relationship with an old-fashioned agent (unfortunately I don’t have such a relationship at the moment nor do I think that I will manage it in the future, as the fact that I would only go to them for complicated airline tickets and not hotels, cruises etc means that I am unlikely to be a profitable customer).
Stupid question, but what about middle name(s)?
I’ve never had any trouble with First Middle Last, First M Last, or First Last. Even when there’s been a mismatch between the ticket, ID (full name), and the FF account, it hasn’t been an issue. My family and I have FF accounts with all the variations.
Is our experience typical or lucky?
I made the arrangements for a travel group and got a birthday wrong and that person was rejected at the TSA line.
Fortunately, was easily corrected at the airline ticket counter and the guy took it in stride.
Now, I require a copy of their driver’s license prior to putting any future groups together.
Just remember, traveled with the same guy on another trip. I had TSA PreCheck, he didn’t.
Yet, both boarding passes came with TSA PreCheck.
Go Figure!!
Depending on the (I really have no idea what it depends on), TSA will “randomly” throw a bunch of travelers into the TSA Pre line. My guess is it’s to balance out the lines, and maybe they favor people already on reservations with Precheck people.
Introducing a middleman is seldom efficient or cost-effective. I acknowledge that in certain edge cases, it might be justifiable, especially if it offers specialized services or exclusive access, in which case does raise questions about the provider’s distribution model. Nevertheless, here is my recent experience with corporate travel, where I had no choice but to use them. Despite being a high-touch model, the outcomes were far from satisfactory:
1. I had residual value from a previously unused ticket, but they mishandled the MCO#, leading the airline to refuse to issue the ticket
2. Subsequently, they proceeded to issue a cash ticket without informing me.
3. Upon discovering this within 24 hours and requesting cancellation and reissuance, they were unable to do so because the airline still considered it a replacement ticket.
The lack of communication and competence in this scenario is disappointing, although not entirely unexpected. I don’t anticipate the typical travel agency to provide substantial value to begin with. Yes there are good agents out there, however, as they are few and far between, their cost structure would be inherently inaccessible to the mass market.
There must have been situations in the past where the odd case must have been let through. But now probably not, too strict. They should put your nickname or other names ‘also know as’ on your passport.
What’s the big deal? That ticket is not going to be used again. The airline caused a lot of trouble for nothing.
Matthew, you also missed the point from the CBC article where PD would not sell Doug a new ticket, saying there were no seats, even though he would free up one.
That is troubling. I did miss that.
I had an agent put my birthdate on my wife’s tickets. Fortunately, the agents at the ticket counters were able to correct each ticket on the round trip.
I really feel for the guy. Having worked in reservations and at a ticket counter for 35 years (United), I am well acquainted with this problem. Jack/John,… Sue/Susan,…. Mike/Michael – whew some real stressful moments for people when they do this. Unfortunately too late when you’re checking in and all the Security/ Passport rules take precedence.
I could not emphasize enough that passengers do two things (three).
1. Book as actual given first and last name ONLY. Middle names and initials do not matter no matter how “generic” your name is.
2. Just Robert (not Bob) Smith, Susan (not Sue) Jones, etc.
3. Passport should be uncomplicated as well. No need for your family’s grandmother’s maiden name – common in Central and S. American countries ie, (Jose Rodriques Fernandez DeJesus). If you’re going to do that then just still use ONLY First name and Family name (Jose DeJesus). Can’t tell you how many reservations I could not find and the person kept providing a wrong family name at check in – totally exasperating. Nobody cares what your family name ancestry is/was.
I realize many people don’t know this so here we (you) are educating them once again.
….as well….. for those that think it’s any easy fix by just correcting or changing the name, once the ticket has been issued and a name change is done, airline staff are loathe to do it because the ticket then has to be re-rated to current day (and roundtrip if applicable) – domestic or international. This could cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars in difference. I for one, having extensive ticketing background (unheard of these days) was able to do so with minimal fee collected. Now it would probably be impossible for an agent to appeal to anyone, supervisor or rate desk to do this). Ugh.
I can attest to the problem of booking via Opodo, Expedia, etc. so I always book directly with the airline unless there’s a really significant discount.
I have had success changing typos on international tickets via secure chat with AA and UA in last 2 months. No hassle at all.
No cost and it was quickly done by the e-agent.