Hi,

I have booked a journey from Managua to Taipei on China Airlines. China Airlines is the airline issuing the ticket, but the first 2 flight legs are on Avianca.

Even though I put the correct details into the booking, China Airlines have issued my tickets with a truncated middle name. It is missing the final 2 letters. The first name is correct, and the last name is correct too.

This discrepency is visible if I use the China Airlines website booking inquiry section, and the equivalent on Avianca (which sends me to checkmytrip.com).

I contacted China Airlines, they told me that their system has a hard limit on name length of 24 characters. That is why 2 characters have been dropped from the middle name. They are unable to add the missing letters because of this limit, the system won't accept longer names.

They tell me that there is no problem here, China Airlines staff know of this limitation and will let me board even though there is the small discrepency between the middle name on my passport and the middle name on my ticket.

Knowing that this can be a tricky area, I also contacted Avianca, to be sure that I won't have problems when I check in for this journey; the first legs being Avianca flights. However, Avianca customer service are insistent that the ticket MUST be changed by the issuing airline otherwise boarding will be denied.

That leaves me in a tricky situation, 2 partner airlines apparently unable to cooperate on naming details.

Any thoughts on this? Is it true that I will be denied boarding? Any suggestions on how I can resolve this situation?

Thanks.
D.