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The GDS systems have worked like this forever, and likely this won't ever change. The GDS can claim the issue is on the travel agent side, who should have writt
by jakub_g 7y ago
The GDS systems have worked like this forever, and likely this won't ever change. The GDS can claim the issue is on the travel agent side, who should have written the lastname as AMRMR.
Having said that it clearly sucks and is super confusing and annoying to affected people, especially given the horrendous prices some airlines demand to change the name on the booking etc.
It seems like a small thing and I'm hypothesizing but I'm pretty sure no one sane at time will risk changing this, deploying to prod and hoping that nothing breaks. There's hundreds of airlines and thousands of travel agents involved.
The rule about having a title after the name without any separator is clearly a bad design, but now you have decades of systems (and hacks) built on top of it, you can't just change it like that overnight. In the same way as you can't change how certain broken web APIs work because there's too many websites that rely on that broken behaviors.
Yet another, more local and fixable issue is the airline app which doesn't allow 1-letter last names. This is the same as the apps which helpfully validate email address and reject many valid emails. The best regex for validating emails is /@/. Anything else is probably broken.
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Another big issue in the industry is that PNRs are 6-digit long and sequentially generated over time, which is a security problem, as demonstrated by CCC a few years ago. If you know someone's name and that they're flying on a given date with a given airline, you can try to brute-force-guess their PNR number and get their personal data or even change their reservation. Again, this is so rooted into the systems that it can't be changed without a massive industry collaboration - probably a years-long project with $$$ cost. For now the GDS have anti-bruteforce mechanisms in place, but it's not good enough solution IMO for a determined attacker.
- nathancahill 7y ago> given the horrendous prices some airlines demand to change the name In practice airlines are fairly lenient concerning misspellings, out of order names, missing diacritics, etc. The name change fee applies mostly to changing the person who is flying.
- djcapelis 7y agoI have a one letter first name and Air New Zealand refused to book me with only one letter in my name and then equally refused to change it when it caused problems later matching my frequent flier mile account on another airline without charging the ridiculous name change fee, which the airline agent at the desk said the computer system would not allow her to waive.
- randomidiot123 7y agoChange your name. Everyone deserves a real name. Life is too short to have a one letter "name". The amount of time wasted dealing with this kind of shit...
- dylan604 7y agoBut how much time would then be wasted writing/typing out all of those extra letters in their name? Then, dealing with updating every account they have. Your sarcastic response wsan't even well thought out. Developer's time is expensive to waste in a gov't office to address a bug left from their parents.
- randomidiot123 7y agoI was not being sarcastic whatsoever. I know two people who have changed their name because they didn't like the name they were born with. My suggestion is 100% dead serious.
- Piskvorrr 7y agoMind you, your chosen nick is appropriate: it's some random system which dislikes the name, not the bearer. "Everyone change your name to an ASCII-representable one so that the devs [i.e. me] have an easier job" is truly shortsighted.
- randomidiot123 7y agoThe dude has a one letter name. This has consequences beyond your short sighted focus on computer systems. It's socially awkward to have a one letter name.
- btown 7y agoRight. The GDS systems doing anything other than pointing the finger at a third party (like, say, fixing the bug) might be seen as admitting responsibility. In fact, this is a good way to ensure that the bug never gets fixed. If Sabre has enough money to send Bill Clinton and Mark Ronson to Hawaii for a glorified frat party [0], it has enough money to tear through all but the best-funded legal challenges. (You'd think I'm joking. Nope.) [0] https://hawaii.fcglobalgathering.com/a-huge-global-wrap-up/ https://hawaii.fcglobalgathering.com/a-huge-global-wrap-up/