I mentioned it before, I had a check in agent at premium check in at Singapore refusing to check in my partner because his name did not match exactly the name in the passport. His name in the passport John XY Smith on the ticket it stated John Smith.

IATA allows a number of characters to be different, I believe it is 3, so even though it was 2 characters missing they refused to help. Most online searches and even TSA states it needs to be an exact match.

https://www.tsa.gov/travel/frequentl...my-application

In our case the BA manager in Singapore had to do us a favour and change the name on the ticket before the 3rd party agent would check us in.

So, yes there are a lot of examples where the exact match was flexible, but the rules state the opposite.

Globalist