Title added to first name on booking - Problem?
 

Today I booked a pair of return tickets through an online travel agent to travel between LHR-KUL in around a month's time.

Electronic ticket record arrived some hours later this morning (in pdf format) and all appeared to be perfect but when I went to check the booking on Malaysia Airline's website, I found that our titles, "Mr" and "Ms", have been appended to our first names rather than placed in the title fields. (The title fields are empty).

I called the online travel agent and their member of staff assured me there was nothing to be concerned about and the issue was quite common and due to some incompatibility between the GDS booking system and that of the airline.

However, I am not 100% happy with this because you occasionally hear of nightmare tales of people being denied boarding. I also don't think it's unreasonable to expect that our first names appear correctly on the website of the airline who are carrying us. Then again, surely even the most pedantic of check-in staff can clearly see the names are exactly the same as our passports (obviously minus the addition of a title to our first names) and that the electronic ticket record is 100% correct.

Never had anything like this before so be good to get some advice.

Perfectly normal. Have a nice flight! :)

Enjoy your flight.

Absolutely no problem. Happens all the time and no-one is denied boarding because of it.

Many thanks. I will sit back and relax now.

Titles are not even relevant and have not been for 30+ years. They are still available as a customer service matter because there are people who want their specific title used and that then requires "Dr." and so on. While the better practice would be to eliminate the field, that is not in the cards.

Be assured that it is not used for any purpose and that many carriers will show "Mr. John Smith" as "SmithMr John" or Smith JohnMr) or any other permutation. So long as the words "John" and "Smith" occur in the name fields, you are fine.

It's not important, the titles are supposed to look like that in the non-customer friendly platform (i.e. the one the airline sees).

Just a quick update and can confirm there were no problems at check-in with the name situation. We also got automatically allocated bulkhead seats on both outward and inward flights. Food was good and seats were comfortable. Only slight annoyance is that we don't get any Avios

On a separate topic, much less impressive is the 14 day Tune Talk traveller SIM which I purchased at the airport on arrival., Think I got scammed as I paid for a 14 day SIM but was given a cheaper 7 day version instead as it stopped working a week into our holiday.