Is it Joe, or is it
Joseph? Is it Rich, or is it Richard? Is it Kate, or is it Katherine?
One woman found out the expensive way that it’s always
better to use your full name on all documents when traveling.
The fiasco happened last summer and was her
boyfriend Phil's fault, as he booked a ticket aboard Virgin Atlantic for a
journey to Brisbane and Melbourne in Australia and then on to London and Qatar.
The boyfriend booked the ticket through a
third-party website called Student Universe, but that wasn't the
problem.
Instead, the problem was that he booked the
ticket under her nickname, Kate, instead of the more formal Katherine, which
was the name on her passport.
Suddenly, the deep discount they found through
Student Universe disappeared when Virgin Atlantic would
not accept her ticket when the two names didn’t match on the booking and the
passport.
In
total, it cost them more than $3,000 to rebook the ticket to match her
passport.
Phil
jokingly called it ‘an administrative error’ on his part.
The
pair contacted Student Universe at the airport, and Kate's more formal name was
able to be changed. It was an expensive name change back to Katherine to match her
passport.
“They
didn’t have time, that was their
reasoning, to issue a name change on the ticket — but they had time to sell us
a new ticket,” Phil said.
The
hard lesson to be learned is that in this day and age of more scrutiny and
security, it is important to book any ticket to match the name on a person's
passport.
The
happy ending is that Phil and Kate were able to complete their trip despite the
additional expense they weren't expecting.
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