I have another confession to make. Like countless other individuals, I have been flying under a false name for literally decades now. (Probably another good reason for keeping this blog anonymous.)
Airline reservation systems (if not many computer systems generally), you see, have a problem with hyphenated last names and, as I recently read, problems with any names containing any character that is not found in the English alphabet (or, more precisely, the ISO basic Latin alphabet). Spaces, however, are ok though. Exactly why this is the case is somewhat of a mystery and why it’s still the case is an even bigger one. You can sort of understand it from way back when when computer systems were a lot more primitive and, more likely than not, programmed by some nerdy white male from the Western world. But the intervening decades of progress, both technological and societal, mean that the computers have not only become more powerful, but also that the nerds programming the software they run now increasingly include other genders and ethnicities.
Nevertheless, the only solution available to me remains relatively simple and completely non-technical: forget the hyphen and either run the two parts together as a single name or use a space instead. (Or, equivalently for other fellow victims, to remove all the fancy accoutrements from the letters from those languages that like to embellish their ISO-derived alphabets with all manner of squiggles, dots, and lines. Exactly how Malmö Aviation, Nicaragüense de Aviación or even O’Connor Airlines handled their own names remains unknown. It’s perhaps telling, however, that all three are now out of business. Just waiting patiently for the same fate to befall Boliviana de Aviación or Widerøe, among many, many others.) Contrary to the airlines’ explicit instructions, this meant that the name on my ticket no longer matched that on my passport one-to-one. But this was only yet another discrepancy between the actual and the realized that airlines didn’t seem to mind (like, for instance, with boarding times), so neither did I. I certainly had none of the problems John Scott-Railton described in his now apparently deleted blog piece (but summarized here).
Until today …
With the most recent update to their systems (AKA enhancement of my online experience), this tacit agreement with one of my go-to airlines here in Europe broke down. They happily took my money and my last name (with a space) to purchase a ticket with them, but no longer let me associate my stored passport details with the ticket. And with absolutely no reason given either. The system simply refused to accept the passport as it had in the past.
The airline’s help line was anything but because, as is becoming increasingly common, support issues are initially handled by virtual assistants, which, true to their name, are virtually useless. No matter what I typed in as my question, the response was always “Or find out how you can enrich your journey…” with a link to my trip details. Anyone who’s worried about AI taking over the world someday just has to deal with one of these algorithmic numbskulls a few times to realize that they can’t even take over a first-generation Furby with mange and a dead battery.
The breakthrough to the breakdown came when I tried to re-enter my passport details from scratch and the system told me that my hyphenated last name was “not a valid name”. (Others elsewhere have had this experience too.) I’ve got two different countries (Canada and Germany) saying otherwise—which is two more than Elon Musk could say for his son X Æ A-12—but the airline’s system was adamant: hyphen = invalid. If I removed the hyphen, my (fake) last name was suddenly acceptable. Although the system did not complain about the invalidity of my saved, hyphenated passport details, I tried removing the hyphen just the same. And, εὕρηκα!. Just like after a nice, long, hot bath, everything was cool again: I could associate these false passport details with my ticket.
Now I just need to forget the warning that the system brought up that my passport details have to match the information on my passport exactly. Fake name on the ticket? Experience shows it to to be unproblematic. Fake name on my passport details? Let’s wait and see. Border guards and probably the TSA too tend to be far more pedantic and far less forgiving than gate attendants.
It’s a truism that you can never make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious (or variations on that theme). As an amateur white nerdy male, I know that it’s impossible to trap all the ways that other people can bring my simple computer programs to their coded knees. But why is this ISO-conformity all still a thing in this day and age? Could it be that the airlines are hiring precisely these ingenious fools to program and simultaneously foolproof their reservation systems?
Might not be that far off the mark. Seriously. How else can you explain getting push notifications to check in for a flight that already took off nine days earlier?
(And, no, Lufthansa, is much more of a “got-to” rather than a go-to airline for me …)
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