Comment by zenethian
3 days ago
The number of times that a website rejects my first name because it has a hyphen in it, even in 2025, is astounding. I get told all manner of things by support staff, like "just leave it out" as if it's just not an important part of my name or anything.
Indeed. My passport correctly includes the hyphen in my surname. Air New Zealand doesn't support spaces or hyphens so my surname is written out as both words concatenated (i.e. Onetwo). Qantas doesn't support hyphens but does support spaces so my surname is written out as two words (i.e. One Two).
Thankfully apparently this is common enough that I've had tickets including travel on both airlines (as Qantas cancelled a flight and ticketed me on Air New Zealand instead) traveling internationally work just fine. Even things like the automated customs gates work fine. I suspect under the hood their systems just strips out all non-alpha characters and compares that (i.e. 'onetwo' == 'onetwo').
Online/moible forms can be an issue tho. Spark, the biggest mobile phone carrier in New Zealand, doesn't support hyphens in account names, just to name one silly example.
I've got the same problem with a hyphenated name, and it was always the way they phrased the error messages that annoyed me. Porter Airline's error message for the longest time was "Your Name is Invalid". No, my name is valid, your system doesn't support it.
I ended up having to contact their support quite a few times for them to fix the error message. Still doesn't work, but at least the error message is reasonable now.
> I suspect under the hood their systems just strips out all non-alpha characters and compares that (i.e. 'onetwo' == 'onetwo').
That would be the MRZ version. The identity page of your passport has a blob of monospace text at the bottom that's used as the 'canonical' version of names for most or all air travel systems.
The airline/travel systems are full of this stuff.
I have mostly documents that include my full middle name, and the way half or more of air travel systems deal with that is to just crunch the first and middle into one name.
But: it all works fine.
> Even things like the automated customs gates work fine.
I would like to think (Perhaps naively?) that these systems key off your passport number/ID (which is by construction, not subject to these problems) to deliberately side-step issues like this.
It drives me mad when various forms sternly requires me to enter my name "as it is spelled in the passport" only to tell me that my name is "invalid" or "incorrect" or "not allowed". Then we have the systems that have non-standard transliteration rules …
I have never been known by more than one name, but the spelling sure differs.
It's annoying that airlines writes "as spelled in passport", when what they really need is an upper case alpha-only version of your name.
But it is also equally annoying that passports don't clearly spell out a "international and systems compatible" version of your name.
We've had Airlines for way over half a century, and visas for about as long as we have had passports and people still walk around with international identification documents that cannot be understood by travel and immigration agencies internationally.
What they probably mean is the name as it’s spelled in the MRZ (the ‘Machine Readable Zone’, the two lines at the bottom of the passport), which is also stored in data group 1 in the embedded chip. Passports can also contain the full name in UTF-8 in data group 11, but this is an optional field.
The MRZ can only contain the characters A-Z (uppercase), 0-9 and <. ICAO document 9303-3 describes conventions for transliteration of other characters into this limited character set.
> But it is also equally annoying that passports don't clearly spell out a "international and systems compatible" version of your name.
They do in the machine readable area. Maybe not "clearly".
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I‘m laughing in Brazilian… we (and certainly my case) tend to have so many family names plus particles (like „de“ or „junior“) that often the full name does not fit in forms, which leads to cropping my family name(s) or removing spaces, sometimes both. And then in some forms such as airlines where the family name is the username I have to try a few different combinations to „guess“ which is the one the airline‘s systems used for me.
Some people here have an apostrophe. Names like Ainul can be 'Ainul. And I guess the Bobby Tables equivalent is Ai'null. It's due to arabic sources, where A and A' are different letters like o and ö. I used to do some consulting for the home ministry, and these legal names are all over our databases.
I imagine apostrophes would be a complete nightmare for most countries to sanitize or validate.
My wife is Korean. The anglicized version of Korean given names always has a space in it. This makes for a few kinds of broken naming schemes - like removing the space or the second half of the given name becomes the middle name, or the second half of the given name just truncated entirely.
In Singapore given names can have more than one space and may not be a substring of the full name. The first prime minister has the full name "Harry Lee Kuan Yew" where Lee is his family name and "Harry Kuan Yew" is his given name. (Later in life he dropped "Harry" from his name.)
To be more precise, many Singaporean Chinese names are formatted as WESTERN_NAME SURNAME CHINESE_FIRSTNAME_1 CHINESE_FIRSTNAME_PART2. The WESTERN_NAME may or may not be a legal name (AFAIK for Lee Kuan Yew it never was), and to further complicate things it's not unknown for the Chinese name to be duplicated in its dialect and Mandarin readings, leading to "Harry, Lee Kuan Yew (Li Guangyao)".
Combine this with Anglocentric IT systems, and I'm sure Mr Lee (RIP) gets a lot of spam addressed to "Mr Yew".
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And the ones that are too incompetent to strip (or add) hyphens to phone numbers.
Or handle single-digit month numbers in a date.
Or...
There's a number of websites and forms that reject entire domain names for email that have a hyphen in it, despite a hyphen being perfectly valid in modern DNS usage and domain names in every ICANN TLD.
Same, as someone with two middle names. Both scenarios are very common.
I can beat this. My wife's maiden name was in the form "Jane Angela Smith". When we got married, she changed it to "Jane Smith Jones", first name Jane, middle name Smith, last name Jones. Someone at the Social Security Administration entered it into their database as first name "Jane", no middle name, last name "Smith Jones".
Now, for fun, no one noticed this for about 25 years. Her Social Security card says "Jane Smith Jones". Her driver's license says "Jones, Jane Smith". Her US passport says "Jones, Jane Smith". But another part of the federal government says "Smith Jones, Jane". We only found this out when she tried to renew her driver's license recently and the clerk was like, "hey, this isn't matching up right...". A month later, the TSA clerk at the airport stopped her to ask why her passport didn't match her federal records.
So now we're paying $400 to legally change her name from "Jane Smith Jones" to "Jane Smith Jones". That's what the notice they make you pay to run in the newspaper says, anyway.
The father of an acquaintance of mine, still a child at the time, migrated from Spain to Argentina with his uncle. On arrival, the uncle was asked for his name. "Guzman y Gomez", he replied, meaning himself (Guzman) and his nephew (Gomez).
End result: both father, uncle and all their offspring now have "Guzman y Gomez" as their last name.
(Yes, this is a pseudonym. No burrito for you.)
This is now my go to story about name nonsense for a while.
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I’ve wondered about this myself, though I only have one middle name. Do you typically enter both middle names into the “Middle Name” form field?
I have two middle names, in fact in my country legally we go with 4 names [first name, father's name, grandfather's name, and last name]. It is always a guess game when converting to only 2 names systems. In many cases I'd just go with my first name field including all of the first 3 names just to match the passport (especially for airflights booking).
Not the person you asked, but I also have a 2 word middle name. I enter both but it's a crapshoot as to whether it will take the first, the second, or both. I think a lot of older systems could handle 2 words in the first name (e.g. Joe Bob or Mary Ann) but not the middle.
I have two and it has never been a big problem. Anything official will have a 'middle name(a)' section and you just put both in there. I think it is sufficiently common that official systems deal with it. I have occasionally had the second one dropped but not on anything very official.
If your full name is John Charles Paul Jacob Smith, then by definition the middle name is "Paul" right?
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or people whose middle name is their first name.
Hey, that's also relevant to me! I've checked my local laws, and where I live, your legal name is the one you consistently present yourself as. If you're Joe Frank Smith, and you go by Frank everywhere, that's your legal name.
I've gotten so tired of having this argument. Inevitably some clerk will insist on calling me by my first name, "you know, your legal name". No. My middle name is my legal name. It's what my mom, sisters, wife, friends, teachers, coworkers, doctors, and everyone else call me. My first name is an aka at best, except the only people who insist on using it are ones wrong about the law, so I'm not even really "known as" it.
I once closed a bank account 10 minutes after opening it because they insisted that my debit card be printed as "Joe Smith", not "Frank Smith". I told them I'd absolutely refuse to touch it because that's not my name. I find it interesting that it's mostly local orgs who are a pain in the neck about being wrong about this. You'd think a small local bank would know local law better than a huge multi-national, but the giant bank I opened a business account with was totally fine putting Frank Smith on my accounts. Go figure.
(Somewhat related: That's made me super sympathetic to trans people who want to be known as something other than what's written on their birth certificate. Yeah, I get it. It's nails on a chalkboard when someone calls me Joe, so if you don't want people calling you Tammy anymore, I'm on your side.)
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I legally changed my name to drop the hyphen. I kept an accented character, but don't use it for legal documents or plane tickets.