My name causes an issue with any booking! (names end with MR and MRS)

My name causes an issue with any booking! (names end with MR and MRS) - White Concrete Stone on Green Grass

My name is Amr Eladawy. Whenever I get a ticket through an agent and they put my first name as Amr, it lands as A only in the Airlines system. That happened with many airlines and different agents. That is pretty much annoying, specially during the online check-in.

When I make a direct booking from the airlines website, the ticket is issued as ELADAWY/AMRMR.

It seems that there is a smart rule that considers the suffix MR as Mister and drops it.

Is this the correct behavior? What should I do to have my name printed correctly on my bookings.

  1. In one of my bookings, the first and last name were swapped by mistake. However, AMR in the last name was not a problem at all.It seems that this rule is applied only on the first name.
  2. The airlines will swear that they received the name as A and the agent will swear that the name was sent as Amr.
  3. The problem maybe in the GDS used to integrate the agent's system with the airlines's.
  4. I sent an email to the GDS about this issue and they simply ignored me.

Now, moving forward. Amr is a very popular Arabic name. It's also a very old one and has been used for thousands of years. How to properly report this to the GDS providers and get this issue fixed?

I have tried contacting one GDS responsible for the latest booking I had, but they ignored me.



Best Answer

It sounds as if the 'issue' you are having is that your name is not printed correctly on the ticket. You should however expect few if any practical problems. Airline booking systems arose in the childhood of computer technology and are still subject to many restrictions, which now seem odd or obsolete. Since it is always a risk involved in changing or extending a running system and the name related restrictions in the booking system impose no problems for regular operations, airlines are hesitant to implement only 'optical' improvements with no or few real and relevant benefits.

That means of course that many passengers will not have their name printed correctly on the ticket, not only those with their name ending in 'mr' or 'mrs'. I have the impression that most booking systems only allow the letters a to z (without case distinction) in their name fields and this means that all passengers will double names, hyphens, case relevant distinctions, letters outside the basic a-z in their name or behold, names written in a non-latin script, will have their names incorrect on the ticket. Since fixing the problem may risk introducing a new bug, which actually interrupts flight operations, the airlines are likely not very willing to recognize these limitations as a relevant and need-to-be-fixed issue.

I assume that the convention of appending 'MR' or 'MRS' at the end of the name arose around the time that governments introduced advanced passenger information requirements. At least the US APIS interface requires the airlines to also report the passenger's gender and since the gender previously was of no interest for the airlines, it was usually not recorded and the different booking systems didn't likely even have a field in their reservation records for the passengers gender. Since it was easier for the airlines to squeeze the gender information into the already existing name field instead of extending the reservation record with a new gender field, they obviously started to do so.




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More answers regarding my name causes an issue with any booking! (names end with MR and MRS)

Answer 2

Regarding your question if it is normal behavior for system to drop MR, system does recognize MR after any letter as title and in your case leaving just letter A. Space between name and title is actually ignored. You should always insist to see how your name is written before issuing the ticket (regarding airline agent).

When agent enters command for the name in the system they should type like this (in GDS Amadeus)
NM1ELADAWY/AMR MR or NM1ELADAWY/AMRMR, then there is no chance that it would be mistaken.

I am not sure about airlines web platforms. Usually when you enter your data you have drop down list with titles and you choose MR. Then continue with entering other information normally in field for name, last name etc. It is usually very easy to use. Always check the name when ticket is issued. If something is still wrong, call the airline immediately, don't wait for online check-in.

Answer 3

Maybe try with 'Amrmr'? I'd expect that the system will take the last 'mr' and leave the name as 'Amr', as wanted. I'd ask the airlines to try it.

Answer 4

From the outside, this appears to be a classic programming mistake/shortcut.

The old booking systems like to stick honourifics (e.g. "MR", "MRS", "MS", "DR") at the end of the given name (most of us have witnessed this on our plane tickets).

But, instead of using a separate logical field for it, they literally did just stick it at the end of the first name.

As a consequence of that hack, when they want to get the first name back they have to take the "MR"/"MRS"/"MS"/"DR" off again.

In your case, the system is doing that as a blanket rule, without actually checking whether the input had a title appended.

I don't think you're going to be able to work around this, but I also don't think it should cause you a problem. Oddities like this are going to be well-expected by staff.

Answer 5

Another strategy might be to pretend you misunderstood the form and swap the fields. Then when the ticket says “last first” and your passport says “first last,” some agents won’t notice and only the most obnoxious will give you trouble.

Answer 6

This is slightly off-topic and might get voted down, but this is due the booking system being a Western-oriented system. In my situation I travel a lot between China and Europe, and when booking tickets in China, I have to pay more attention to the order in which my name is specified. Mostly it is not a big deal, but I have been in situations that they weren't able to immediately find my information based on the name.

This is likely also why they never assumed MR could be part of the first name as they might have used a suffix as indicating Mr (as also mentioned above). There are likely a lot more situations that cause edge cases, like limited input length, having to use romanization, no special characters, etc.

Best would be to get an online booking in which you can verify your own information, or confirm on the website for the boarding pass as this usually allows you to alter much of the PII (or notice this in-time).

Safe travels

Answer 7

In fact it is taken as Mr. I work for one of those companies and can assure, depending on the system the travel agency or online service is using, the mr at the end will be taken as "mister."

Answer 8

I'm a software engineer and I worked for a big firm and its international e-commerce website.

Formatting rules for international addresses and people "salutation" are very specific by country.

In Japan, the salutation Mr or Mrs goes after the name: Paul Mr.

Maybe some stripping text code is going to be confused due to this. Try to suggest this to the company.

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