dolcevita902

Hi all,

I apologize if I am not posting this in the correct forum. My mother and her sister recently purchased airline tickets to visit me in Italy. There was a mistake made when booking - their surname begins with Mac (how they've spelled it their entire lives without issue but apparently doesn't match birth certificates) however, their passports spell it Mc omitting the 'A'. The reservations were mistakenly made using the 'Mac' spelling and because they were purchased via FlightHub (huge mistake - they know this now!) the airlines are unable to help and FH is unwilling to. The first two flights are operated by Air Canada and the last by Alitalia. Countless hours have been spent on the phone trying to rectify this issue to no avail. Notes have been put on their files (OSI NCC?) and the APIS data has been entered to match the MC spelling on the passports. They (hopefully) fly on Thursday; can anyone offer any advice or similar experience?

Thanks

Fiordland

This becomes easier once the reservation is out of the hands of the travel agent and under control of the airport staff.

When you check in, the check in agent needs to adjust the ticket in the Air Canada system. It is such a small change that no one is going to suggest it is a different person, however it appears to be very important to the airline that it matches so their employees will type away for a few minutes and the problem will then go away in the Air Canada system. They will then print you new boarding passes. If it is not caught at check in, the agent at the gate will likely do the correction.

My guess, is the check in agent with Alitalia will likely need to do the same thing.

I would not be to worried about it. WestJet, (AC competitor in Canada), starts most of their boarding announcements with "If your ID and boarding pass don't match exactly, please come up and we will fix the boarding pass."....

Bohemian1

Good advice. One of my colleagues went through exactly the same thing and, after many phone calls with our TA and AC, the check-in folks took care of it in about 10 minutes. Get there early, explain your story and they should be able to get it sorted.

Mauricio23

As for Alitalia, I used to fly them quite often a few years ago, with a one letter mismatch between my passport / credit card / boarding pass (difference between Italian and rest of the world spelling that is impossible to correct on official documents). Nobody every noticed or asked. This was a letter substitution, not an extra letter though.

Seat13F_AC_CRJ

The Italian alphabet has only 24 letters. ;-)
--
13F

Mauricio23

Both my letters exist in the Italian alphabet. The problem is the Italian penchant for translating names on official documents - a widespread practice 3-4 decades ago.

IluvSQ

I would recommend getting it fixed before flying.

A couple of years ago, I made a typo on my mother-in-law's name on a ticket that was YYZ-(AC)-YVR-(MF)-XMN.
Instead of writing her first name as XYZ, I entered XaYZ.
In Toronto, check-in with AC took a while, but they let her board.
However, in YVR, she was denied boarding by MF.
It ended up being a very costly error.

LondonElite

My personal view is that hardly anyone will notice it. Getting these things fixed after the ticket is issued is usually impossible/expensive. Either have it done at the airport or don't bother at all. There are so many transliteration to the Latin alphabet mistakes made that hardly anyone notices.

RangerNS

Its not the likeliness that someone notices, or that someone cares, its the cost when someone does, and does.

I hear that several/many/all actual border services have the official policy that allows corrections to obvious typos, mistakes, and transliteration choices, but I also hear "I work at the airport, and you're wrong".

hborrego

I would try to change it no matter what