I’m taking my first international flight this year. I’ve got my passport and bought the plane tickets. However, I noticed that my middle name on the ticket is missing the last 2 letters. I contacted the airline and they said that middle name doesn’t have to match passport. I just want to make sure that is correct, I don’t want to get stuck at some airport because my middle name is missing 2 letters on the plane tickets.
You shouldn’t have any trouble. If they have a protocol to flag that kind of thing, they’ll resolve it by confirming the name on the card that bought the tickets, not turn you away.
Thank you for the clarification and peace of mind!
So the deal is that they print X characters on tickets for first and middle name and Y more charactersfor the last. As someone with bizarrely long names my middle name often ends up cut in half. You should be fine - the real data associated with your ticket is saved on a server somewhere and there are cultures with multiple middle names that inevitably have far more strange circumstances than you (like names being out of order).
I wouldn’t stress about it.
I was thinking about that too, thank you for clarifying and giving me peace of mind
For flights, you’re probably fine. For visas, it might depend on the country
My surname contains spaces. I’ve yet to encounter an airline that is able to handle that properly, so my last name on a ticket never matches my passport name. Either parts are missing, or they just print it as a single word. Never given me issues, so I doubt a slightly truncated middle name is going to pose a problem.
Coming from Malaysia, I have quite the non-standard order of names with my surname being the in the center. It gets more complicated because most Malaysians don’t have a surname, so none of our official documents have a Surname / Firstname field, just a Name field.
Flight tickets always look bizarre because the order is off, and bits of the last part of my name is taken off. Surprisingly this has never been a problem with the airlines in Europe / NA / Asia. The only EU country to give me a grilling about the name was at the Italian border.
As I was holding a visa in the U.K. since 2010s, the home office’s compromise with me was to list my whole name as my last name. Thereby making documents in the U.K. match my passport name. Although since about 2 years ago, they’ve finally relented and recognised my last name as such.
Another odd side effect of this is that I have 2 credit scores, depending on the name order.
I had an incident where my driver’s license was missing the last letter of my middle name and the plane ticket had my full middle name, the TSA agent questioned it but didn’t hold me up.
When I renewed my license the next time I made sure they were able to get my full middle name on there. Just didn’t want to get the wrong agent.
As others have said you should be fine. A different middle name would be a challenge. But a truncated name should be business as usual.
For what it’s worth I’ve never run into an airline that prints middle names correctly on the ticket, I’m pretty sure anyone that’s been working security more than an hour is used to it.
My husband’s middle name starts with A, so his name straight up gets changed to the feminine version of his name on tickets sometimes! He’s had a comment about it maybe once ever, and it was just the TSA agent joking about it.
Oh wow. Thanks for the peace of mind. I’m never traveled internationally, and I always assumed there was zero tolerance and everything has to be exact.
One of my relatives has a last name that has characters not in ASCII, she could fly to the US and back without issue despite her last name not matching on the passport, ticket and visa.
These desks are manned by humans, so you will most likely be fine, but you might catch an idiot as well.
I have three middle names, and somehow have ended up with about half of my government docs using all three, and some using only one. I feel stupid about it, but I’ve never had a problem and have flown internationally many times.
