Flight booking issue with last minute

travelbug123

Back in January I booked flights to Bali from London Heathrow for 3rd June, with Garuda Indonesia. We booked them through lastminute.com as it was a reputable company and were told that we could not print our boarding passes off until 24 hours prior to take off.

As it is now a week until our flight, we went onto the Garuda Indonesia website to see if there was anything that we could do and for general information regarding our booking. We did not have information on how to access our flight on the airline flight and instead figured it out ourselves. Upon retrieving our confirmation, we noted that our passport details included the initial 'H' as both of our middle names, something that was not included on our confirmation from lastminute as we did not provide this information.

We contacted Garuda and asked if it would be possible to change these details and were advised that this was not possible and to change our passport details we would need to delete our booking and rebook. If we did this and the change was more than 3 characters, we would be charged a refund fee for the previous booking.

We then rang lastminute.com and were told that this would not be an issue and that this happened quite often, he told us that they did not worry about middle names and were only concerned with first and last names. We asked for this to be sent to us as a written confirmation and he said that could be arranged.

2 hours later we received another call from somebody at last minute who told us that it would in fact be an issue and they said they would refer it to be sorted and mark it as an immediate priority. We were told that we would be emailed when it has been sorted. It has now been 72 hours and we have still not heard anything, when ringing up after 48 hours we were told to wait another 48 hours and if we still had not heard then to call back.

Does anybody have any advice on this issue or have experienced this themselves?

Caz3121

travelbug123 wrote: »

We booked them through lastminute.com as it was a reputable company

I assume you have now checked reviews and have found out that they are part of Bravofly (since Dec 2014) Worth having a look on the tripadvisor air travel forum as you will likely find many others that have had similar problems

littlereddevil

have to agree, they are not reputable at all.
Also you can't deal with Garuda if you didn't book with them.
And why didn't you book direct?

eDicky

Don't worry about the middle initial, it is only the first name and family name that are important (except certain airlines who specifically request full name, I don't believe Garuda is one), so the first advisor you spoke to was reasonable.

As it was their own error, Last Minute cannot charge for a correction so it's unlikely they will get around to it, which may be just as well in case they make a worse mistake somehow.