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.
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...
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.
I don't even have spaces or punctuation in my names, but certain US airlines will inexplicably truncate my middle name in half and append it onto my first name, so my boarding pass ends up with "LAST FIRSTMID" printed on it. Fortunately I've never been stopped for it; I'm sure they see it all the time.
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.
I’m missing “Everyone has a first name and a last name” on the list. Collegues from India certainly do not always appear to have a first or last name.
Or I’m missing something about formatting. French last names are always written UPPERCASE it appears. Funny side-effect is that if a French company takes over a Dutch company, after the integration, all last names of the Dutch are also in uppercase.
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.
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 :)
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 García in Spain [1], and there are regional differences, in some areas it could be higher, so statistically, there will be García García (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.
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]
Reading such stories always reminds me of taking the TOEFL test. At least at the time, their website was full of all sorts of warnings and threats about what would happen if you registered with a name that did not match the legal name on your ID. Yet their website did not let me enter the letter "ä" in the name field.
What makes this all the more puzzling is that TOEFL is presumably aimed at people who are not native English speakers, so you would expect all sorts of non-ASCII characters to be fairly common.
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 don't 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.
> 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.
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".
I got business cards made that politely explain why my appearance may not match their expectations based on my name, and that has been quite effective at diffusing such problems.
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.
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'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.
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".
> TSA doesn't like when the name on my ticket doesn't match the name on my ID (it's illegal)
Not sure how illegal it really is in practice, as my driving license and passport have different spellings of my name and my green card has a different name (I always fly with the passport name but use my DL (not "RealID"!) to get through TSA). This mismatch has been true for 35 years and I have never had trouble traveling to/from or within the USA. There is also both a typo and, separately, a different transliteration of my name on my OCI card but I have never had a problem with that either.
The computers are sometimes picky but humans seem to be able to deal. Even countries that are supposedly picky.
I did once have trouble boarding a flight to the USA because of the d/m/y vs m/d/y thing with my green card -- they thought the card would expire within six months and I wouldn't be allowed in. But the various variations of name haven't been a problem.
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.
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.
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.
I’m curious how this works with the new ID-scanning machines that no longer require a boarding pass. Maybe there’s some level of fuzzy-matching name/sex/dob?
I assume for TSA Precheck users there’s some lookup that can just grab your KTN from the database from your ID and look up tickets based on that.
I'm used to situations when systems do all sorts of things to my last name, given that it contains a non-Latin letter.
So far I've encountered such scenarios:
- The system accepts my original last name just fine.
- It says that a last name can only contain Latin letters and thus refuses to accept it.
- It replaces the non-Latin letter with some gibberish.
- It drops the non-Latin letter altogether.
Especially the last two scenarios have lead to some confusing/frustrating situations in the past. For example, not being able to check-in to a flight with the same last name that I entered during the booking process (only using the "transformed" last name worked).
My middle name is "Fabæch". Or actually it's legally part of my first name, probably because the Danish Civil Registration Number was established in 1968 and was at the bleeding edge of what was possible with computers back then. So no field for middle names, so a secondary first name it is. In actual reality it has been passed down my family so that should logically make it a "family name", which would be a last name in usual western name order.
So far I haven't had any real problems, just annoyances. Often when buying something online the page wants me to write my full legal name "exactly as written on the card" - and then promptly refuses my full legal name. I have even had sites saying something along the line of "Validation Error: Invalid name". That's really not a good look...
With airlines they usually tell me to write my first and last name "exactly as written" in my passport, and then refuses to accept the 'æ'. At least airlines have a standardized substitution of 'æ' -> 'ae' and so far I haven't encountered any problems using that. It's also what it says in the machine readably part of the passport, so I guess that is really what they mean by "exactly as written in my passport".
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.
> 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.'
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.
> People in the Indian state of Mizoram don't have last names. Imagine what Southwest and the TSA would do with that.
For reference, Mizoram is in the northeast of India. People in some other Indian states, including in the south (where the language and culture are quite different), don’t have last names either. In some cases, they may use an initial (just one letter) that’s derived from the father’s name. In some cases even an initial may not be used (mononym). In visas, the U.S. consulate typically puts a “FNU” or “LNU” in these names, standing for “First Name Unknown” and “Last Name Unknown”, respectively.
Yet within India people are forced to create last names since some specific government issued IDs require that (it’s clear that those were designed by people who didn’t think of catering to the enormous diversity in the country).
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, so there's no corresponding PR backlash that fixes things.
I am of mixed nationality and as such have two surnames, typically separated by a dash "-".
The last time I went to renew one of my passports, I was informed that my country eschews using foreign surnames on passports. After insisting, I ended up with brackets "()" on my passport.
Besides being a complete displeasure when travelling, I wonder if there is a reasoning for this policy. If for example some database has values saved in the local language, my foreign name cannot be represented correctly because we do not use Latin script. Thus my foreign name gets omitted, and effectively only is for show.
Does anyone have an idea how certain countries (China, Korea, Japan) deal with this?
In the VIZ (human readable part) Japanese passports have Latinized names; Chinese passports have both Chinese characters and also a Latinized alternate. Both are acceptable according to the ICAO specifications.
Technically anything other than the Latin alphabet is supposed to be transliterated, but I know that (for example) Ö is rendered as-is on Austrian passports; albeit as OE in the MRZ.
[+] [-] protastus|2 years ago|reply
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|2 years ago|reply
--
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...
[+] [-] kiwijamo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BHSPitMonkey|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seanmcdirmid|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quantified|2 years ago|reply
There are many variations out there (any authoritative?)
[+] [-] q7xvh97o2pDhNrh|2 years ago|reply
No, believing there's an authoritative list is one of the falsehoods programmers believe about falsehoods programmers believe about names.
[+] [-] stouset|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sebazzz|2 years ago|reply
Or I’m missing something about formatting. French last names are always written UPPERCASE it appears. Funny side-effect is that if a French company takes over a Dutch company, after the integration, all last names of the Dutch are also in uppercase.
[+] [-] ht85|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Al-Khwarizmi|2 years ago|reply
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 :)
[+] [-] serial_dev|2 years ago|reply
3.48% are called García in Spain [1], and there are regional differences, in some areas it could be higher, so statistically, there will be García García (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...
[+] [-] juped|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yladiz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noodlesUK|2 years ago|reply
I always think of the ever relevant “Falsehoods Programmers Believe about Names” [1]
[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
[+] [-] 998244353|2 years ago|reply
What makes this all the more puzzling is that TOEFL is presumably aimed at people who are not native English speakers, so you would expect all sorts of non-ASCII characters to be fairly common.
[+] [-] klempner|2 years ago|reply
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 don't 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.
[+] [-] shoo|2 years ago|reply
(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|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buzzm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryan-c|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zurtri|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wrs|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Terr_|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NovemberWhiskey|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NovemberWhiskey|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e-brake|2 years ago|reply
Never had a problem, even with three Es.
[+] [-] thechao|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aio2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rurban|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] traverseda|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gumby|2 years ago|reply
Not sure how illegal it really is in practice, as my driving license and passport have different spellings of my name and my green card has a different name (I always fly with the passport name but use my DL (not "RealID"!) to get through TSA). This mismatch has been true for 35 years and I have never had trouble traveling to/from or within the USA. There is also both a typo and, separately, a different transliteration of my name on my OCI card but I have never had a problem with that either.
The computers are sometimes picky but humans seem to be able to deal. Even countries that are supposedly picky.
I did once have trouble boarding a flight to the USA because of the d/m/y vs m/d/y thing with my green card -- they thought the card would expire within six months and I wouldn't be allowed in. But the various variations of name haven't been a problem.
[+] [-] grardb|2 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfKhY3sAQ9E
[+] [-] jenny91|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klyrs|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zerocrates|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeaBrain|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jackson1442|2 years ago|reply
I assume for TSA Precheck users there’s some lookup that can just grab your KTN from the database from your ID and look up tickets based on that.
[+] [-] hnnnnnnngggggg|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Waterluvian|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rpozarickij|2 years ago|reply
So far I've encountered such scenarios:
- The system accepts my original last name just fine.
- It says that a last name can only contain Latin letters and thus refuses to accept it.
- It replaces the non-Latin letter with some gibberish.
- It drops the non-Latin letter altogether.
Especially the last two scenarios have lead to some confusing/frustrating situations in the past. For example, not being able to check-in to a flight with the same last name that I entered during the booking process (only using the "transformed" last name worked).
[+] [-] poizan42|2 years ago|reply
So far I haven't had any real problems, just annoyances. Often when buying something online the page wants me to write my full legal name "exactly as written on the card" - and then promptly refuses my full legal name. I have even had sites saying something along the line of "Validation Error: Invalid name". That's really not a good look...
With airlines they usually tell me to write my first and last name "exactly as written" in my passport, and then refuses to accept the 'æ'. At least airlines have a standardized substitution of 'æ' -> 'ae' and so far I haven't encountered any problems using that. It's also what it says in the machine readably part of the passport, so I guess that is really what they mean by "exactly as written in my passport".
[+] [-] dbg31415|2 years ago|reply
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.'
[+] [-] pseingatl|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] miki123211|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wtmt|2 years ago|reply
For reference, Mizoram is in the northeast of India. People in some other Indian states, including in the south (where the language and culture are quite different), don’t have last names either. In some cases, they may use an initial (just one letter) that’s derived from the father’s name. In some cases even an initial may not be used (mononym). In visas, the U.S. consulate typically puts a “FNU” or “LNU” in these names, standing for “First Name Unknown” and “Last Name Unknown”, respectively.
Yet within India people are forced to create last names since some specific government issued IDs require that (it’s clear that those were designed by people who didn’t think of catering to the enormous diversity in the country).
[+] [-] Terr_|2 years ago|reply
Nobody hears about The Artist Now Again Known As Prince being held up at the gate and missing their flight, so there's no corresponding PR backlash that fixes things.
[+] [-] shoaki|2 years ago|reply
The last time I went to renew one of my passports, I was informed that my country eschews using foreign surnames on passports. After insisting, I ended up with brackets "()" on my passport.
Besides being a complete displeasure when travelling, I wonder if there is a reasoning for this policy. If for example some database has values saved in the local language, my foreign name cannot be represented correctly because we do not use Latin script. Thus my foreign name gets omitted, and effectively only is for show.
Does anyone have an idea how certain countries (China, Korea, Japan) deal with this?
[+] [-] NovemberWhiskey|2 years ago|reply
Technically anything other than the Latin alphabet is supposed to be transliterated, but I know that (for example) Ö is rendered as-is on Austrian passports; albeit as OE in the MRZ.