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

Question

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.

Answer 1

Airlines were early pioneers in communication technologies, and have been very slow to modernize. For example, today, airline IT systems still communicate extensively using TTY: Type-A for synchronous communication, and Type-B for asynchronous communications.

There is a standard for TTY, which nobody follows, a de-facto standard by SITA, which is mostly followed, and many parties have quirks in their implementation, either not being able to parse some fields/special indicators, or emitting incorrect ones; everything you'd expect from a 100 years old format which grew organically as new needs and ideas arose.

This is a pervasive theme in Airline IT, with multiple epochs of technology being used side by side as companies migrate very slowly.

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The airlines will swear that they received the name as A and the agent will swear that the name was sent as Amr.

They are both right, quite likely, and the issue lies between the Travel Agency and the GDS.

GDS -- such as Amadeus and Sabre -- generally offer multiple interfaces into their systems, from old ones kept for compatibility reasons to more modern ones. More modern interfaces will accept structured messages which leave no room for ambiguity; the old ones however... are full of quirks.

In general, Travel Agencies are loath to modernize their IT: it requires re-training the agents, and buying new software, which costs quite a bit of money with little to no benefits to them.

In the case of a Travel Agency connected to Amadeus, for example, this means that they are likely using ATE: the Amadeus Terminal Emulator, which as the name implies emulates the terminals of old.

Check the Quick Reference Guide, p. 33 on how to create a PNR:

NM1SMITH/JOHN MR

• NM: "Name" command.
• 1: 1 passenger with the following surname.
• SMITH: surname.
• JOHN: first name.
• MR: title.

Using a space, the parsing is unambiguous, however not all agents put a space, thus if instead the agent types:

NM1ELADAWY/AMR

Then the command will be parsed as (NM, 1, ELADAWY, A, MR) to be "helpful".

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The Good

As mentioned, internally a GDS will use structured records. If you solve the data entry issue, and your first name is properly recorded into the system, then you should not have to worry about further issues.

The Bad

You'll need to double-check the agents' work. Just because they type AMR does not mean that the system will interpret it as AMR, as we've seen.

They can fix the issue by explicitly specifying the title: NM1ELADAWY/AMR MR.

The Ugly

Agents may not be entering your name in the system immediately, for a variety of reasons. If they do not, you cannot double-check that they did it properly. You may have to insist that they do it immediately.

Online Travel Agencies

OTAs generally have more modern, automatized, systems. As such they are more likely to rely on the more modern interfaces of a GDS.

Using an OTA may be a simpler way for you to ensure your name is properly entered in the system.

Good luck

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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 4

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 5

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 6

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 7

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 8

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 9

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.