Comment by kiwijamo
2 days ago
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.