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by kelnos 1020 days ago
Why not just have a single field for "your name as it appears on your identity document"? Or do the various airline systems expect the name to be split into separate fields depending on the locale?

I've always found it weird how broken this is. Some US airlines have separate entry fields for first, middle, and last names. But then they jam it together on the boarding pass as "Last, Firstmiddle" (yes, with first and middle mashed together, and middle lowercased). That of course doesn't match my ID, but I've never had a problem traveling, even when I sometimes leave out my middle name entirely. (I guess I get less scrutiny most places since I'm an American white male.)
3 comments
bpicolo 1020 days ago
> do the various airline systems expect the name to be split into separate fields depending on the locale

Bingo. I've had this problem dealing with insurance carriers. They want a very wide degree of name formats, and to make it worse some don't support unicode, some don't support apostrophes, and some don't understand names longer than 22 characters (had multi-hour discussions on exactly which part of the names I needed to cut out in this scenario). They were bewildered that these were problems for data which could include anybody in the US...

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lifthrasiir 1020 days ago
There may be multiple identity documents with different names. This particularly happens a lot when the name itself is not written in Latin script and has to be romanized---one of my credit card had a different romanization (that I couldn't control) compared to what was written to my passport (that I had a control). Of course it is also possible that there is no canonical romanization available in any of those documents as well.
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numpad0 1020 days ago
Airlines are always weird. I remember myself consistently being FIRST/LASTMR on tickets; all caps, no space, with a slash, no comma. I suppose it's some canonical encoding that everyone working in commercial aviation just knows.
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junar 1019 days ago
That reminds of an issue with a passenger whose given name ends in the letters "MR".

https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/149323/my-name-ca...

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21490850

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