[HN Gopher] What to do when an airline website doesn't accept yo...
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What to do when an airline website doesn't accept your legal name
Author : xmprt
Score : 63 points
Date : 2024-04-06 18:22 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.preethamrn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.preethamrn.com)
| quantified wrote:
| Falsehoods programmers believe about names:
| [https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...]
|
| There are many variations out there (any authoritative?)
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| > There are many variations out there (any authoritative?)
|
| No, believing there's an authoritative list is one of the
| falsehoods programmers believe about falsehoods programmers
| believe about names.
| timoteostewart wrote:
| Coming soon:
|
| "Falsehoods programmers believe about authoritative lists"
| tomaskafka wrote:
| 1. They exist.
| timoteostewart wrote:
| 2. If a list calls itself authoritative, it is.
| lagadu wrote:
| But is an Authoritative list of non-authoritative lists
| that lists itself authoritative?
| timoteostewart wrote:
| 3. Authoritative lists cannot contradict each other.
| stouset wrote:
| This list is great, but what I find missing in these
| discussions is _what to do about it_.
|
| And the answer is: if at all possible, only use a name for
| display purposes. Use a username, a UUID, or some other
| appropriate unique identifier that you can control the
| semantics of for _absolutely anything_ for which you might need
| to assume any property whatsoever.
|
| If you can avoid having a name, don't even try to collect one.
| If you need one, it should be a single freeform text input
| accepting an arbitrary-length and arbitrary-content UTF-8
| string. Persist that string exactly as you receive it. Perform
| no operation on that string other than rendering it.
|
| That isn't perfect but it's as close as any of us can
| reasonably get as things stand today.
| 998244353 wrote:
| I like to add a 41th rule to this list: "There exists a
| _right_ way to handle names that does not make any incorrect
| assumptions. "
|
| That, unfortunately, isn't always possible. Sorting a list of
| people by their names alphabetically is a fairly reasonable
| thing to ask and in many places, it is expected that names
| will be sorted the surname, whether or not it appears first.
| This by itself requires breaking rules 18 and 20, but we may
| not be able to opt not to do it.
|
| The hard problem is not what to do in the ideal case: the
| hard problem is figuring out how to handle names in a way
| that minimizes friction if requirements force us to make some
| such assumptions.
| jenny91 wrote:
| TSA doesn't really give a crap about the name. I always put my
| preferred name on airline tickets, and nobody ever complains.
| klyrs wrote:
| That'll work, until a petty bureaucrat decides to ruin your
| day.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| This is not true. You can apply for a redress number to
| prevent future exception handling. The TSA and DHS makes this
| an easy process, I have helped more than one person through
| it.
|
| https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/travel-
| redress...
|
| https://www.dhs.gov/dhs-trip
| ascar wrote:
| Until it's the German bureaucrats that ruin your day.
|
| This is an international issue and a national answer
| doesn't solve it.
|
| For what it's worth my first name is also not accepted
| correctly (it contains a hyphen) and I never had a problem
| so far. But every time an airline asks me to put my name
| exactly as in the passport I cringe.
| TeaBrain wrote:
| I was once prevented from advancing through security by a TSA
| agent due to the first name on my ticket not completely
| matching my legal first name on my id, even though it was
| obviously a derivation of my legal name.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| The derivation I use of my first name is obvious in some
| countries and completely unknown in others.
|
| Like how a random Asian security person at an airport might
| not guess that Dick Wolf is Richard Wolf.
| hnnnnnnngggggg wrote:
| True, but Global Entry and Precheck would.
| zerocrates wrote:
| The airlines commonly (universally) cram a first and middle
| name together with no space, and this never seems to matter. I
| know there's a certain degree to which the info that goes to
| TSA about who you are isn't exactly a match for what's in the
| airline's reservation system and what's on your boarding
| pass... to what extent it's that system at work here vs. the
| name actually not mattering that much isn't really clear to me.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| [delayed]
| rafaelturk wrote:
| My legal first name has a space in it ?
| killingtime74 wrote:
| Mine has two spaces. xxx yyy zzzzzzz. I'm Chinese. It's not a
| middle name, all first name
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Reminds me of this story"
|
| Vietnamese name man admits hoax in Facebook battle
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-34918491
| protastus wrote:
| 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.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| 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...
| shoo wrote:
| > 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
| Muromec wrote:
| > 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.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| 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.
| Deathmax wrote:
| 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.
| shoo wrote:
| > I was able to book my flight with the credits. I still don't
| understand how they were able to when I wasn't.
|
| (speculation) the customer support person on the other end of the
| line likely has multiple windows open containing terminal
| applications. With terminal A they directly create a booking
| record in the booking mainframe, filling in some code indicating
| "booking paid with points". With terminal B they pull up your
| balance in the points mainframe & manually enter a deduction.
| Muromec wrote:
| Yep, either Sabre or Amadeus console with cryptic two-letter
| commands and macros
| grardb wrote:
| Airlines are among the worst when it comes to this for some
| reason. I gave a talk[1] a while back about the problems that
| occur when programmers introduce logic around people's names, and
| a good chunk of my stories/examples involved airlines.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfKhY3sAQ9E
| NateEag wrote:
| I wonder if airlines are no worse than any other organization
| at dealing with human names, but they're exposed to many more
| edge cases than the average company, since they're in the
| business of enabling rapid travel between continents.
| Muromec wrote:
| I think that's the case. Any other organization is bound to
| some kind of context with it's own set of arbitrary choices
| and restrictions, but only restrictions in GDS are "two names
| both at least one (or two?) letter each, spelled with Latin
| alphabet, non-case sensitive". Funnily enough, the set of
| restrictions used by Visa/Mastercard one step later in the
| process is subtly different.
| guhcampos wrote:
| The reason is GDS systems are some of the most atrocious pieces
| of essential software out there:
|
| https://media.csesoc.org.au/how-bad-it-holds-airlines-back/
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Is there a decent modern argument for why names are split across
| 2-3 fields rather than "here's a text field. Make your mark in
| unicode." ?
| froddd wrote:
| Marketing.
|
| "We want to address them by their first name because it's so
| much friendlier and personable".
|
| That's all I can think of. Not exactly 'decent'.
| jsheard wrote:
| That's not hard to do properly though, you can just have a
| "Full Name" field and a "Nickname" field. Let the user
| specify how they would like to be addressed informally
| without baking in any assumptions about how names are
| structured.
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| Some cultures order personal names and surnames differently.
| Here in the US, name order is sometimes swapped when a full
| name needs to be provided: "Last, First Middle" vs "First
| Middle Last".
|
| Years ago the Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, requested
| that he to be referred to as Abe Shinzo.
| https://thediplomat.com/2020/09/abe-shinzo-or-shinzo-abe-wha...
| Muromec wrote:
| It has cultural significance and leaks information. People
| sharing the same "family name" are presumed to be family.
| Patronymics show in which way people are related (whether or
| not certain two people are father and child). Some names in
| some countries also leak gender and sometimes also martial
| status. Spliting the name into "given name" and "family" name
| allows people to change family name to signal significant
| changes (e.g. marriage) happened.
|
| You could of course say it's irrelevant and should not happen,
| but it's _fun_ and people like this kind of fun.
|
| You could of course go full Myanmar and say "put whatever here
| and also it's about 70 bucks fee to change it whenever you want
| to whatever you want", but that opens a host of other
| administrative problems, as global demographic database luckily
| is not a thing.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| If you don't have to interface with anything else, it's
| probably fine. If you have any non-trivial integrations then
| you'll probably run straight into "but what's the FIRST_NAME
| and what's the LAST_NAME"?
| noodlesUK wrote:
| On a related anecdotal note, one of the many reasons my peers
| aren't changing their names when they get married is because it's
| a huge administrative pain to track down every database you touch
| and get them to change things.
|
| I always think of the ever relevant "Falsehoods Programmers
| Believe about Names" [1]
|
| [1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-
| programmers-...
| pseingatl wrote:
| 1. I wonder what John Paul I or II would have done.
|
| 2. Now you know what those who have apostrophe's, al's, ben, ibn,
| de la, von, etc. have to go through.
|
| 3. People in the Indian state of Mizoram don't have last names.
| Imagine what Southwest and the TSA would do with that.
| Terr_ wrote:
| It's unfortunate that celebrities with odd names are often rich
| enough that they bypass the problematic flows for regular
| people with odd names.
|
| Nobody hears about The Artist Now Again Known As Prince being
| held up at the gate and missing their flight leading to a PR
| backlash that fixes things.
| miki123211 wrote:
| Regarding the John Pauls, they actually had "normal" names,
| John Paul was strictly a religious designation that they took
| when they became popes.
|
| It's similar with most celebrities, Lady Gaga is known as Lady
| Gaga by her fans and the media, but she's "Stefani Joanne
| Angelina Germanotta" to the government and other bureaucratic
| institutions.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Ideally websites cater for everyone and are bug free.
|
| But, given a fixed dev time, it's best to build a website that
| can handle most customers needs, and then give customer service
| (via phone/email) the admin/power user abilities to deal with the
| few special cases that the website cannot handle.
|
| So, IMO, the airline here has done everything right.
| kdmccormick wrote:
| Except that those special cases often land on the same groups
| of people. Accented characters, multiple given names, multiple
| surnames... these are all common for people whose ancestry
| isn't the US or Western Europe. No driver's license, no
| permanent address, no social security card... these are all
| common for poor people.
|
| It's great that admins can fix the special cases, but the fact
| that they're special cases at all makes life harder for
| assumption-breakers. An action that took 10 minutes on the Web
| for Jim Smith living at 11 Place Road might be 3 hours on the
| phone for Hector Maria Gonzalez Lopez whose address is a P.O.
| box. Those hours add up and can really make folks' life hard
| for no good reason.
|
| Do your users a favor and make as few assumptions about them as
| possible!
| Muromec wrote:
| You don't even have to be that far off from the baseline
| normie to confuse a tech-infested bureaucracy. Being
| registered at the same address as your parents or having a
| name ending in a vowel already significantly increases
| entropy levels.
| Muromec wrote:
| >it's best to build a website that can handle most customers
| needs
|
| This is why regulations and standards imposed externally exist.
| Notably accessibility requirements.
| diegof79 wrote:
| > So, IMO, the airline here has done everything right.
|
| They haven't done anything harmful on purpose. Also, they
| provide an alternative path (calling their customer service)
| that works.
|
| During the last decades, companies and government services have
| reduced human agents as much as possible to reduce costs.
| However, this type of problem highlights the need to provide an
| alternative path. A silly bug or requirement omission may harm
| many people when there is no alternative.
|
| Anectodal example: I live in Argentina, and my father is an
| accountant. I've heard him say that many times, the systems
| provided by the AFIP (the equivalent of the IRS in the US)
| don't allow certain situations allowed by the tax laws. He
| often says that a bunch of uninformed software developers are
| doing whatever they want with the Constitution. I cannot stop
| thinking about our responsibility as software makers.
| dbg31415 wrote:
| Just another form of discrimination.
|
| This has been an issue with Meta forever, and they haven't really
| bothered to fix it. They are still harassing people for using
| names that Facebook doesn't think people should use.
|
| If it happened once... fine, that's a mistake. If it happens for
| a decade+... it's racism.
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/4wbvzg/facebook-is-still-mak...
|
| > Facebook continues to insist that [Native American] names do
| not meet their name 'standards.' These 'standards' are a direct
| reflection of what society as a whole deems 'normal.'
| e-brake wrote:
| My legal first name is "E". Forms often require more characters.
| I just add more Es!
|
| Never had a problem, even with three Es.
| thechao wrote:
| How's that pronounced? "Eee" or "Eh" or "Nehemiah"... ?
| traverseda wrote:
| Ah yes, Mr "E".
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| GDPR has rules on correcting data and there have been court cases
| deciding that having the correct name listed is a right under
| GDPR.
|
| https://gdprhub.eu/index.php?title=Court_of_Appeal_of_Brusse...
| breadwinner wrote:
| Elon Musk's child's name is X AE A-12. It is best to not do any
| kind of validation (beyond check for empty string) on names.
| delecti wrote:
| I was curious about the resolution of that and looked it up.
| Turns out that the child's legal name is first name "X", middle
| name "AE A-XII", because "AE" isn't a letter in modern English,
| and "12" isn't letters at all. So he'll still encounter several
| of the problems mentioned here (single letter name, hyphens,
| spaces), but at least not ones with computers systems requiring
| names be made of letters.
| tim333 wrote:
| >Elon Musk had to change the name of their baby to comply with
| Californian law
|
| >On the birth certificate, it states that the baby's first name
| is "X", it's middle name is "AE A-XII" and its last name is
| "Musk".
| ht85 wrote:
| I once tried to open a bank account in Spain, which could not be
| done because I did not have a second last name. Spanish babies
| receive the last names of both parents.
|
| The employee was trying her best and I eventually suggested she
| could put my last name twice. She made a face for an instant then
| said she was not allowed to do that.
|
| I later understood that the face was because having two identical
| last names suggests inbreeding or incest... I am sure there are
| plenty of jokes about that in Spanish culture. lol.
|
| I never managed to open the account and in the end had to go to a
| different bank.
| yladiz wrote:
| I'm assuming in this case you do have a middle name that could
| be your first second name, right?
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| That isn't typically allowed. Spanish people also can have
| several given names, but they count as first names, not last
| names/surnames. A bank would typically check your data
| against a passport or ID and wouldn't allow you to put the
| middle name in the place of a last name.
|
| And if for some reason you managed to do it, you would be
| called Mr. MiddleName in all communications.
|
| As a curiosity, Spanish people often have the opposite
| problem - for example, in academia, if we sign papers in the
| "natural" way (FirstName FirstSurname SecondSurname) we'll be
| indexed as Name F. SecondSurname, which is quite jarring for
| us because we typically go by the first surname, not the
| second. So many (probably most) of us hyphenate (FirstName
| FirstSurname-SecondSurname) to avoid automated systems (or
| humans from other countries) to extract our surnames wrong.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| Having two identical last names is very common in Spain, for
| purely combinatorial/statistical reasons. No one bats an eye
| about that. It would only suggest inbreeding if they were
| extremely uncommon last names.
|
| I bet she just made a face because the second surname is part
| of people's identity and has a meaning, it's not something
| people would fake. And it's also used when e.g. checking your
| ID to see that you are the legitimate owner of the account, so
| it probably wouldn't even work.
|
| Of course it's totally reasonable that you suggested that in
| that case, what's unreasonable is the bank's system requirement
| of two last names, but to an average Spanish person it sounds
| odd to want to use a second surname that isn't real.
|
| I know a person who has some certificates to the name of
| Firstname Lastname NULL :)
| juped wrote:
| banks are always asking for your mother's maiden name, and you
| refused only in this one case where it actually made sense to
| give it?
| serial_dev wrote:
| I don't think she made a face because of incest, two people can
| have the same last name without inbreeding, just think how many
| Smiths or Johnsons are in the US.
|
| 3.48% are called Garcia in Spain [1], and there are regional
| differences, in some areas it could be higher, so
| statistically, there will be Garcia Garcia (in fact, in my 8
| months living in Spain, I met one).
|
| Only reason I can think of is that she thought of it as forging
| a document with fake data, and you so openly suggesting
| identity fraud, she made a face, but she then probably
| understood that you are a "naive" foreigner and that you were
| probably not aware that you just suggested giving a fake name
| for a bank.
|
| Btw, I have only one first name and one last name, and I could
| open a bank account without issues in Spain.
|
| [1]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_Spanish_surna...
| buzzm wrote:
| Adding to the chorus of woes, my legal first name is Paul and
| middle starts with A and often the ticket comes out as "Paula". I
| have had at least two heated encounters with gate attendants
| saying the ticket could not possibly be mine because I don't look
| like a "Paula".
| iwork4swa wrote:
| I'll see who I can get in contact with. Sorry about this.
| breadwinner wrote:
| Ann Marie and Mary Anne are common names in the US that has space
| in it. For example, Donald Trump's mother's full name is Mary
| Anne MacLeod Trump. Her first name is "Mary Anne," which is
| considered a double-barreled or compound first name.
| Havoc wrote:
| As someone with some non A-Z chars in name I feel this.
|
| Have missed flights because of it before.
|
| Cut off name at the special char on the ticket...and then they
| wouldn't let me board. It's obviously the SHIT system that is the
| problem here. I'm here, passport and ticket in hand...it's
| obvious what the issue is by looking at them side by side and
| seeing the special char. Nope no joy - your name has to be a
| precise match.
|
| To be fair the culprit here wasn't airline but rather a crappy
| 3rd party booking site (lastminute). Applied for refund, which I
| kid you not came to NEGATIVE 7 bucks which they cheerfully
| announced they'd waive. Thanks Lastminute...a mere 1k down the
| drain!
|
| Always book on airline's site directly even if more expensive.
| Muromec wrote:
| It's the same lastminute that has shitty dark-patterned
| checkout form which shows a confusing confirmation popup with a
| small print that sneakily adds insurance to your order despite
| repeatedly declining it, has a broken website and needs an app
| with a chatbot to modify the order and get that money back.
| zurtri wrote:
| In my SaaS software I made the conscious decision to record names
| as "full_name" (e.g. Mary Smith) which is basically your legal
| name and then "short_name" (e.g. Mary) which is what I would
| address a letter to.
|
| This handles a whole bunch of issues with people who have just
| one name (which I believe is high status in some cultures) and
| cultures where the family name is first and then the given name.
|
| I have had very little issues with it - even though most
| customers expect first_name and last_name.
|
| I had a police officer talk to me about my software and they were
| mucho impressed about how this naming system handles all the
| different name types. They say some of their system have issues
| all the time with some names.
|
| Is it a perfect system? No, but it seems to be one of the better
| ones.
| Terr_ wrote:
| I'd like to do that, but our software has to integrate with a
| ton of different other SaaS software which often has dumb
| first/last splits, so the dumb business logic often oozes
| across.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Do you ask users for both? i.e. "please enter your full name",
| "please enter the name by which you'd like us to call you"
| wrs wrote:
| Exactly, but you can try to default the second one (using the
| same algorithm you'd use to generate "first name"
| unreliably).
| wrs wrote:
| If you want to really do it right, so it works for everyone,
| this is the only way.
|
| However, when I actually did it this way, it caused problems as
| soon as we partnered with another company and had to
| communicate with a system designed in a less-progressive
| manner. (I.e., about 99.5% of existing systems.) We couldn't
| generate an export for that partner without first and last name
| fields, and we had no way to reliably generate those from the
| full name field.
|
| So, ironically, if we had let the user decide how to compromise
| the integrity of their name up front, we would have had a
| better user experience than after our computer started
| butchering it for them.
|
| I guess we just can't have nice things.
| klempner wrote:
| Try living in Japan, where you're generally forced to use the
| name in your passport, including any middle names included (with
| space) in given name.
|
| Meanwhile a typical Japanese name is no more than three
| characters each for family and given names, but someone with a
| western name will have several times that, complete with spaces.
| And of course most of the companies running various websites and
| computer systems care, because foreigners are a single digit
| percentage of the market. If you're lucky you can use a separate
| but equal foreigner flow with fewer features available. (I am
| looking at you, JAL Mileage Bank and your SEVEN character
| family+given name limit!)
|
| It is typically possible to circumvent this using paper systems,
| but that's a particular shame -- one of the nice points about
| online computerized forms is that it is easy to send them back
| and forth through browser integrated machine translation which
| can make them vastly easier to fill out.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| A former colleague of mine, of Polish extraction with a double-
| barreled surname, also has something like four middle names. His
| bank in Hong Kong was apparently insistent that all of his middle
| initials were present on his credit card, but that's too long to
| fit, so they also reduced his surnames to initials as well. This
| results in a card printed with something like "A M J W V C-B".
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