Unreasonable airline charges

benjus

eDicky wrote: »

I think that airlines are more aware in general of various name structures than you might suppose. The 'family name' does not always come last (in Chinese names it comes first for example), and for Hispanics the primary family name is the father's name. Note also that they ask for 'family name', not 'names'.

I have booked and flown with Hispanics in and out of UK, Singapore, etc, and they never include their second surname on the ticket. But when they are asked for 'Full Name as in passport' for visas or immigration landing cards etc, then of course they write the whole string including the secondary maternal surname.

In a similar way we don't include our middle names when we book a flight, we are just asked for a first name and a family name, one of each.

I'm not so sure. The first line of the standard machine-readable passport format is:

• Letter P (for Passport)
• Optional letter for passport type (or "<" if not used)
• Surname, then two "<" characters, then given names. "<" character used to separate words

My wife's Argentinian passport has both of her surnames in the "surname" field, as separate words. So if the computer is looking for an exact match between the "surname" field on the machine-readable passport and the surname used for booking, it would fail if only her paternal surname were used. The check-in clerk may be able to override this, but it depends on airline policies.

However, I agree that many people do travel using only their paternal surname in the booking, so obviously many airlines are OK with it. I can't really comment on my wife's case as she always travels on her Italian passport which only has her paternal surname.

Gerry_Attrick

Hello Everyone. Thanks to all who responded. While I can accept that I didn't follow the instructions correctly, I still feel a charge of $100 per ticket seems an 'unreasonable' and punitive amount. Perhaps other airlines are more punitive still, but that doesn't make it reasonable.

richardw

Perhaps research some international consumer law to see if you can recover some monies due to their unreasonableness.

eDicky

Gerry_Attrick wrote: »

Hello Everyone. Thanks to all who responded. While I can accept that I didn't follow the instructions correctly, I still feel a charge of $100 per ticket seems an 'unreasonable' and punitive amount. Perhaps other airlines are more punitive still, but that doesn't make it reasonable.

On the other hand, if what you were doing was charged in the same way as changing the actual passengers who would travel on the ticket, it seems very reasonable.

It seems likely that there's no way to distinguish between changing the actual passenger and correcting the same passenger's name. Although it may have been understood what you were actually doing, there's not always a possibility for staff of a major international airline to waive the rules as a goodwill gesture.