United Airlines’ Web site may have hit a glitch over the weekend, and if you have hyphenated last name, it could affect you. Reader Char James-Tanny reports trying to buy a ticket through United.com, but having the reservation stall when she tried to pay. A company representative told her the problem was on the back end of the reservations system, and was being fixed.
“I went through the ‘find a flight’ process and selected the flights I wanted,” she explains. “But when I got to the payment screen, I got a message that my information couldn’t be processed.”
The information had been auto-filled, since she’s a frequent flier. “I couldn’t get the message that I would be paying for my ticket until I removed the hyphen from my last name, but then it couldn’t process the payment because the last name on the form didn’t match the last name on my credit card,” she explained.
Fortunately, a call to United eventually cleared everything up.
United has made a change to their site “innards” and the problem was with my last name. I maxed out the number of times I could try to process payment, and then called United. They were very nice and very apologetic about my problems and processed my payment immediately. So the good news is that I have my tickets!
I’ve contacted United to see if this problem has been fixed. In the meantime, all you hyphenates out there, watch those dashes when you book on United.com.
Update (11/27): United’s response to this problem is to advise passengers to not use a hyphen in their last name.
Update (12/19): I’ve had a subsequent conversation with a United about this issue. It turns out this is a problem with the GDS (reservations system) used by United, not United.com. I’m told the GDS has a problem with hyphens, and that this is not a new issue, as James-Tanny claims.
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Oh it gets better than that. I’m a software product manager; rising through the ranks of programmer to get there.
So imagine my frustration that when my reservation got inverted – including an error message generated by United’s webserver – as I had my computer skills questioned and criticized by “customer services” whose English was minimal; and disdain generous.
Good thing I captured a PDF of the error and refused to hang-up until the manager relented on “forgoing the $200 penalty” to route me correctly as I had originally reserved.
Speaking of stuff that is not allow on this web site: e-mail addresses with a ‘ ‘. Gmail allows logon whateveryouwant@gmail.com, which is a handy way of keeping track of who gave your e-mail away. Not that I don’t trust you Chris, but nevertheless if I didn’t I could not use that option on your website. (that would be something like myname elliot@gmail.com)
Hmmm, you don’t allow ‘plus’ signs. Perhaps that’s the problem.
Speaking of hyphenated last names, United isn’t the only one with this problem…
Most domestic carriers have this issue. My wife and I (she hyphenated her last name) went to St. Martin/St. Maarten this past year for her birthday. I tried to put her last name into the AA website for an award ticket, and it kicked it back until I took out the hyphen… I’ve had similar problems with Delta as well in the past, although they seem to have fixed the problem with some of their newer upgrades.
I’m still waiting to see the carnage when William Smythe-Jones marries Jennifer Adams-Morgan. This silliness over hyphenated names will come home to roost soon when the progeny of the hyphenated grow up enough to get married and have further hyphenated children.
I guess they’ll give birth to James Smythe-Jones-Adams-Morgan. Then in a few years we’ll need to deal with airline websites that do not accept three hyphens. Then, 20 or 25 years from now, James will marry Mary Claire Elliott-Canton-Smith-Warren and the resulting child will be Edward Smythe-Jones-Adams-Morgan-Elliott-Canton-Smith-Warren because no one wants to be so subservient as to give up their own last name for the sake some sexist convention designed to take away their essential separate identity. Give me a break.
Joe,
I am not sure what your screed has to do with travel, but as someone who’s unlikely to ever be confronted with a decision to change your name, you’re hardly in a position to judge. And when it comes to booking tickets, I imagine Smythe-Jones-Adams-Morgan’s dollars spend as well as Joe F’s, so if the airlines want them, they’ll make the minimal effort (more of a decent QA, actually — accepting one hyphen is as easy as accepting several) to accomodate his/her personal choices, however ridiculous you, yourself, might find them to be.
Julia – you are pretty defensive and hostile about my opinion about a societial etiquette issue. Personally, I could care less if when people get married the woman decides to take the husband’s family name or keeps her own. For whatever reason – professional, personal, sense of family and identity, to get the big inheritance – whatever. In my own close family we have a married couple that is Mr. X and Mrs. Y – no one cared or even mentioned it. And you know how family is – some great aunt has an opinion about everyone else’s business.
That being said, something has to be done about the hyphens. Its not about airline tickets or birth certificates or wedding registrations. What is your name? You hyphen, then they hyphen then everyone has three or nine degrees of hyphenation and it just gets silly.
If the new convention is that a woman keeps her family name – then I’m fine with that. Lets just make up our minds. A man and a woman should have the ability to choose what works for them, so long as they keep in mind that they are no in fact the only people in the whole world, and that they live in a society that needs to record their family events in permanent records.
So, Smythe-Jones-Adams-Morgan-Elliott-Canton-Smith-Warren does not work. And if you cannot see that, then our society has fallen off the edge into inanity.
In may other cultures and countries, hyphenated names are quite common and are not a new phenomenon at all. I married a man from one such country who already had a hyphenated name (and that name was not new — no one in his family can even trace how far back it began), and did not feel the need to hyphenate further. I have noticed that many websites geared to these other cultures handle these hyphenated last names with no problems whatsoever.
Having lived in Europe, I have known many women with hyphenated last names who married men with hyphenated last names. My evidence may be anecdotal and not scientific, but Joe, let me assure you that no one involved in any of those unions felt the need to hyphenate further. No carnage ensued. The world kept spinning.
Making simple programming changes in order to provide basic levels of service to as many customers as possible is not inane. It’s a sound business practice for any online presence, especially for travel providers, as name matches mean everything when traveling these days. It can be argued, however, that worrying about something that has nothing to do with you and is sure not to bring about the apocalypse most certainly is inane.
I have experienced the same issue with airline websites/bookings. QANTAS will only accept my surname when both names are merged together into one word. It can’t take anything but one word as a surname hyphenated or not. Seems very antiquated when for many years now people have had hyphenated names. It’s not something new.
This creates issues as my tickets don’t match exactly with my passport and other identification as they should. Since the stricter regulations have come into place the airlines should have improved their software to ensure that travellers can enter their names correctly.
I legally changed my name 30 years ago, merging my parents’ names. When I got married 7 years ago, I kept my name. And our son has his father’s last name…the hyphens stop here ;-)
The bigger issue I had with United’s site is that I flew 50,000 miles on United last year, and until last week, had no problems booking and paying for tickets.
My United frequent flyer account uses my hyphen. My license and passport use my hyphen. My credit cards use my hyphen. My ticket, however, does not use my hyphen. And by not allowing me to use my legal name in the billing fields, I can’t pay for my tickets through the website. This means that I have to go through customer support, which means that I have to spend time on hold and they have to pay their support people to process payments when they could be helping someone else.
A month ago, there were no problems. Now it’s “don’t use a hyphen”? Thanks, United.
Joe F- I have to agree with both Julia and Amy. Your original posting had nothing to do with the topic at hand and was extremely insulting to boot. I usually agree with what you post but you were way out of line on this one. Where exactly have you met Ms. Smythe-Jones-Adams-Morgan-Elliott-Canton-Smith-Warren? No where and if someone chose to do this, it is not the end of society as we know it as you wrote in your response. This is an issue solely in your mind. If you want to think we’re all being defensive, you need to reread your own posts and see how much vitriol you put out.
Amy is exactly right. The airlines should fix the problem. Period. That is all that needed to be said.
The same issue happens with an apostrophe in the last name. It is hit or miss on which websites will accept and which will not. Continental does not. I luckily have not had an issue with anyone at the airport questioning the apostrophe in my last name being present on my license but not on the boarding pass… yet…
As Chris notes in his update, it’s a problem with the GDS that the airline uses. United uses a system called Apollo, which does not allow for spaces, hyphens, or apostrophes. I’ve been working with an Apollo system for several years now and it has never done so, in my experience. It’s been a long time since I used Sabre so I couldn’t say if that system has the same limitation.
Airport security is fully aware of this issue, as the poster above noted it’s common to nearly all domestic carriers, and will not detain or trouble you for a missing hyphen or space in your name. Just make sure it’s spelled correctly and you will be fine.