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Old Feb 29, 2024 | 10:59 pm
  #27  
moondog
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Originally Posted by mcjava
Just a note for people trying to access their reservations on Chinese airlines' websites.... Name problems are what I encounter a lot. You book as John David Smith, but usually in the Chinese reservation, it becomes SMITH/JOHNDAVID. Most of the time when I get the '"no reservation found" message, it has to do with how I typed my name. John D. Smith will be SMITH/JOHND etc.
For this reason, I've transitioned over to LASTNAME/FIRSTNAME syntax when dealing with pretty much all Chinese companies (e.g. banks, wechat, alipay, airlines, hotels, utilities) and government agencies, even though my passport has a middle name. In some cases, I need to swap e.g. FIRSTNAME/LASTNAME and/or remove the slash, but these changes are much easier to pull off than adding or subtracting letters...the worst was when the sum of the characters in my FIRSTNAME and MIDDLENAME fields exceeded the combined limit, so I was left guessing between various lengths of FIRSTNAMEM v FIRSTNAMEMID, etc.

The moral to the story is that whenever a company tells you that your account name needs to match your passport name exactly, you'd do well to simply ignore/override them and push forward with LASTNAME/FIRSTNAME.

Last edited by moondog; Mar 22, 2024 at 12:21 am
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