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We booked a flight with British Airways using their website, and the fields for passenger names accepted only ASCII characters for some reason, so we couldn't enter our names exactly as shown in the passports (they have accented characters, think "č", "ř", "ž"...).

We entered the names without the accents, which matches the passports' MRZ but not the name fields on the ID pages.

Will we be accepted at check-in, considering the MRZ names match the names on the booking? Or will there be problems with the accented names in the passport?

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    As a guess you won't have any issues because you're not the first person with an accented name who wanted to fly. There are probably hundreds of millions of people with the same problem, and airlines have already seen and dealt withyoru issue.
    – Peter M
    Commented Nov 12 at 14:05
  • Where are you flying to? Is there an associated visa or ESTA/ETA/e-Visitor etc?
    – jcaron
    Commented Nov 12 at 14:17
  • @jcaron The UK, their ETA system is being activated in April or so but I'm flying there in March.
    – Ondrashek06
    Commented Nov 12 at 21:37
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    Related: travel.stackexchange.com/questions/118130/…
    – Martha
    Commented Nov 13 at 0:11
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    British Airways are usually quite reasonable about minor discrepancies; if it was Ryanair, I'd be more worried.
    – Stuart F
    Commented Nov 13 at 16:08

1 Answer 1

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Using the data from the MRZ is most certainly the best option, it’s the official transliteration of your names, and in many cases that’s actually the data they will use for any comparison.

Any reasonable variation is usually accepted anyway.

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  • +1, this is the advice I've seen everywhere. I have an accent in my name and I just use the ASCII version (based on the MRZ of the passport I'm using, so an Ü would be UE in a German passport, but U in some other countries' passports), I've never had any issues traveling (incl. with British Airways).
    – ave
    Commented Nov 12 at 14:55
  • Sometime things are funny. I do not have accents in my name, so MRZ is OK (but note: I never write the full name, which include a "second first name" which it is inluced in MRZ). Anyway I have two visas with each of them different MRZ names, different to man MRZ (both transliteration from Cyrillic, ont it seems following French pronunciation, and one the German one: guess: the pronunciation of my name is neither of the two). We are far from a sane encoding
    – Giacomo Catenazzi
    Commented Nov 12 at 15:46
  • @GiacomoCatenazzi I hate to think what would happen with unicode encoded names (or do you consider unicode not o be "sane" lol)
    – Peter M
    Commented Nov 12 at 16:25
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    @Kevin and Peter M: ICAO 9303 part 3 (link, page 24) governs this. MRZ has a list of unicode character and valid transliteration(s), each country picks bases their rules on that. The chip does separately store the name in both unicode and ascii, in my case one is with umlaut, one is without (page 52 ICAO 9303 part 10, unicode name in DG11, ascii is in DG1 as part of MRZ. DG11 also has a longer length limit for names (99 bytes)).
    – ave
    Commented Nov 13 at 8:15
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    @PeterM: Unicode is not a solution for MRZ and OCR. The A can be interpreted as the first alphabet letter (capital) in Latin, Greek, Cyrillic scripts (all with different Unicode codepoint). And do we want names with emoji? with variant selectors? And checking names at gate with some seldom scripts (maybe a group travellers, so many with same origin) would be a nightmare.
    – Giacomo Catenazzi
    Commented Nov 13 at 9:14

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