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I can understand the need for airlines to have your full name on record, but why do they care about the structure of your name?

hebam62089
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    I don't think they care that much, they just need your information exactly how it is written in your Passport/ID. – Nicolas Formichella Jun 08 '22 at 05:15
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    See https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ for related reading. – JonathanReez Jun 08 '22 at 06:45
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    @JonathanReez That is a well-known read in the IT industry but what it fails to mention is that when you start trying to give people a single name field, those who do have first and last name start getting confused. – AndreKR Jun 08 '22 at 14:33
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    It was my job for over 10 years to work on a software that (among other things) would try to guess first name, last name, title, prefix, suffix etc. from combined name fields. It also tried to identify bogus entries. The configuration necessary was nuts (we're talking several hundred thousand lines of code, not including reference data). The amount of times it got things right was astonishing, well beyond what a human could do. Yet still it got things wrong every day, because sometimes, the "rules" of names are mutually exclusive. Or because there are people named "John Doe". :-D – DevSolar Jun 09 '22 at 08:21
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    @DevSolar: Wow! Do you still have access to that software? – Vikki Jun 09 '22 at 20:10
  • @Villi: It's not open source, but property of my former employer. I am afraid it is not for sale to private users, either. – DevSolar Jun 09 '22 at 21:43
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    @NicolasFormichella no, in the passport it may be written completely different from the fields, because name order isn't the same in different cultures – phuclv Jun 10 '22 at 02:36
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    Because Reagan Ronald is a different person than Ronald Reagan !? – Peter - Reinstate Monica Jun 10 '22 at 16:20

7 Answers7

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In many societies (but not all), people have one or more given names, and one or more family names.

If you want to identify a person relatively precisely, you want as much of those as possible, at least to hopefully differentiate different people in the same family (even though that often fails miserably -- I can tell you that from first hand experience, as I share the same first and last names with my father and my late grandfather).

On the other hand, it is common in many societies (but again, not all) to address people formally by using only their surname and a title (and to use only the first name in more familiar address).

Programmers and the people around them have long made arbitrary decisions on how names work so they can derive these various forms easily. For that purpose, they need to know which part of the full name is the last name.

For instance, if your name is Michel Martin, knowing that Michel is your first name and Martin is your last name and that your title is Mr, one can:

  • Derive a formal form of address: "Mr Martin"
  • Still have a more complete form of your name for ID matching and the like.

If you didn't know which one is which, you could end up saying "Mr Michel", which isn't correct. And that's of course the simplest case.

Quick anecdote: a few decades ago, when you could take a plane like you would a bus, I arrived at the counter at LAX and asked for a ticket for the first flight to SFO. The agent just asked for my credit card, and took my name from the card to issue the ticket. But it was a french card, and in France, in certain circumstances, you place the last name first, and that was the case on my card (and still is on one of my cards, but not on any of the others!). So I ended up with a ticket for JACQUES/CMR.

Having separately fields for given name and surname works most of the time for people from some Western societies, though even in that context it sometimes fails completely. As soon as you stray outside those areas, it is often catastrophic, but still, there is no easy way to achieve the intended result without this distinction. The alternative would be to ask for full name (for identity) and "form of address", but 90% of people wouldn't even understand the question, and many would think the system is dumb if it can't just guess it from their name...

Another issue is also that "name" or "full name" are very vague terms. If you just say "please enter your name", you don't know if people will enter just their surname, just their first name, or both (not even straying in the territory of additional given names, suffixes, aliases, etc.).

Asking for "given name" and "surname" (or variations thereof) separately at least gives a strong hint to users that they should enter both. Of course that fails for people who only have a single name, and even with those hints, people can easily get confused (especially if you use "first name" and "last name", as the order of writing surnames and given names is not the same everywhere).

Add to that that airline systems are often interconnected with other systems, many of which have been defined decades ago, which require the information to be split this way, and this is not going to change any time soon.

jcaron
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    Add to that the common method in Spanish speaking countries of giving a first & middle name, then pairing the father's last name and the mother's last name for the offspring's last name, you can end up with something like "Jose Maria Santiago Domingo". However, the person usually doesn't use all of that, so you're trying to match names based on "Jose Santiago" or "Jose Domingo". This is an issue I run into constantly with the data I deal with daily. (No, unfortunately, I do not always get a unique ID like SSN or Employee ID.) – FreeMan Jun 08 '22 at 13:40
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    @FreeMan While living in a Spanish-speaking country, I was sometimes confronted with web forms that would not allow me to leave the maternal last name (apellido materno) blank, even though I don't have a Spanish-style surname. I usually just repeated my surname twice. – WaterMolecule Jun 08 '22 at 14:18
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    You could have used your mother's maiden name! :) – FreeMan Jun 08 '22 at 14:32
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    See also for example the concept of a ‘courtesy name’ or ‘style name’ found in some East Asian cultures, which is often unrelated to the given name and surname. Or the fact that traditional Hungarian naming follows the surname-first style used in most of East Asia, despite Hungary being part of ‘the West’. – Austin Hemmelgarn Jun 08 '22 at 16:28
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    Obligatory reference to name assumptions in computer system – justhalf Jun 08 '22 at 18:12
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    I rather suspect that business rules that sort people by individual name components predate computerization. – chrylis -cautiouslyoptimistic- Jun 09 '22 at 03:35
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    @WaterMolecule I think if you end up in Spanish A&E the correct 2nd apellido is "nul". – erstwhile editor Jun 09 '22 at 07:18
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    @erstwhileeditor: I foresee headaches for anyone who actually has "nul" as their 2nd apellido... – Vikki Jun 09 '22 at 08:01
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    "end up saying "Mr Michel", which isn't correct", this also isn't necessarily true. Although Mr is the norm, Mr is not unheard of. For example Sam saying "Mr Frodo" in Lord of the Rings. – Ivo Jun 09 '22 at 10:16
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    while this is an admirably interesting essay on the topic of names and databases, it does not at all answer the question. (the answer to the question is absolutely trivial: "as in passport") – Fattie Jun 09 '22 at 13:29
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    @IvoBeckers I have a first name that can double as a surname and a surname that can double as a first name for the opposite gender. I get a lot because people are confused and swap my first name and surname and then guess the wrong gender. – user3067860 Jun 09 '22 at 14:26
  • The assumption can go the other way. I am Adly Abdullah but if you call Mr. Abdullah my father would answer because he is Abdullah Hamzah and if you call Mr. Hamzah my grandfather would answer. Formally I am Mr. First-name because my full name is Given-name son-of Father's-given-name – slebetman Jun 10 '22 at 02:22
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    I've got 2 first-names and a 2 word last name. My given name (Tonny) is a derivative of one of the first-names, essentially acts as a 3rd first name. The first word of my last name is a common English first name as well, so people often mistake that for my given name. To make matters worse: A few years ago I inherited from a distant family member a noble title. With the title comes another full name that has a 6-word last name (and includes a comma as well) and which introduces a 4th first name + a sequence identifier (like "Anton the 11th, von XXX, von YXZ und ABC"). Names are complicated. – Tonny Jun 10 '22 at 12:27
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    "The alternative would be to ask for ... "form of address", but 90% of people wouldn't even understand the question": ayup. We have a field like that, and half the people write in "Mrs" (just that, no actual name), and the other half write in "Dear Mr. Jones" (yep, complete with the "Dear"). – Martha Jun 10 '22 at 19:30
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If you have a name like Wang Yang in English, that should be identified with someone named Wang, Yang not some other dude named Yang, Wang.

Since it's usual in Asia to write family name first, and the opposite is usual in the West, and sometimes people swap their names around for various reasons, it's better for all concerned to keep things straight. Especially when it comes to computers and databases.

Spehro Pefhany
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    Unless someone has an Asian name but uses Western name order. – Vikki Jun 09 '22 at 02:02
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    @Vikki Exactly, which is not uncommon. – Spehro Pefhany Jun 09 '22 at 06:55
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    ...and means that someone named "Wang Yang" could sort with either "Wang, Yang" or "Yang, Wang", depending on where they were born, who their parents were, the phase of the moon, the positions of various planets and constellations, etc. – Vikki Jun 09 '22 at 08:03
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    And that doesn't help, either. I'm from the one outlier in Europe with the family name coming first, and although I consistently use both the comma and uppercase family name, just to be sure, in all my external relations, people knowing my nationality will often swap it once more, just out of courtesy, arriving at the wrong conclusions again. :-) – Gábor Jun 09 '22 at 14:24
  • The Family-name Given-name rule is common in North-East Asia (China, Vietnam, Cambodia) but South-East-Asia has several other naming rules. Thai names use Western name order and almost never have a middle name. Malaysian/Indonesian names can follow either rule depending on ethnicity but also have an additional convention of Given-name Father's-given-name. So calling someone Mr. Last-name may be interpreted as calling his father. Some people in Indonesia became so annoyed with this as to insist that they don't have last names, would leave the last name field blank and enter 3 word first names – slebetman Jun 10 '22 at 02:35
  • .. Additionally, where some cultures in South-East Asia genuinely evolved without the concept of last names some governments insist that the given name is not enough as a full name so for example in Malaysia you also have the synthetic naming convention of Given-name son/daughter of Father's-given-name with the words "son of" or "daughter of" ("anak", "anak lelaki", "anak perempuan") being used as middle names. – slebetman Jun 10 '22 at 02:41
  • This explains why trhere are two names, but specifically "first name" and "last name", as indeed requested by many airlines, is deeply confusing to people from a lot of cultures that don't know which of their names comes "first" - for example, asians regularly put their family name into "first name" fields. – Remember Monica Jun 10 '22 at 04:55
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While other answers attempt to justify this requirement, and I agree that a system written from scratch today, might make that distinction based on English-speaking norms. However, I think there is a much more important reason it exists in this scenario: because decisions made decades ago are now hard to change.

Much of the travel industry, and particularly traditional "scheduled" airlines, is run on computer systems which ultimately date from the 1960s. Parts of them have of course evolved and been replaced since then, but each new system needs to be compatible with the last, and with other systems still running, so changing fundamental design decisions is difficult.

In particular, reservation details are stored in something called a "Passenger Name Record", or "PNR". Although not fully standardised, these are used throughout the industry, and frequently need to be exchanged between systems without loss of data.

In a PNR, names are represented as a separate first name and last name, traditionally entered and displayed as SURNAME/FIRSTNAME. (Oddly, there is not generally a separate field for the title / honorific, leading to confusing conventions and incorrect display.)

So, the systems want your first name and last name because their system has those fields; and the system has those fields at least in part because its predecessor 60 years ago had those fields.

IMSoP
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  • This is not wrong, but the reason both in the 1960s and today that PNRs need to track surname and given name separately is that different countries have different conventions for which of those is listed first and, so, with a single name field, you'd end up with systems incorrectly interpreting them and/or swapping them when passed from a system in one region to one in another. This is arguably even more needed now than in the 1960s, as most tickets nowadays are booked by the travelers themselves on a website, not by trained agents. Two distinct fields greatly reduces ambiguity in data entry – reirab Jun 09 '22 at 19:05
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    @reirab On the contrary, having separate fields is a real pain for dealing with international conventions. In Russia, where should the patronymic go? In Spain, should both the first and second surnames be included? Are prepositions like "van", "ben", etc part of the surname? It is entirely because so many systems originated in English-speaking countries (let's face it, mostly the USA) that it feels normal to separate them that way, rather than having a single "official name" field that is copied from passports to PNRs to wherever. That's how it works with payment cards, for instance. – IMSoP Jun 09 '22 at 19:47
  • Since many airline require the name to be filled in exactly as it is written in the passport, one could argue to cut the middle man and use an identifier based on the passport instead, preferably one that is globally unique (which I don't believe passport numbers are at the moment). A single field for the name would go a long way, but there are legacy problems here as well, how do you handle Ø and 赵 for example in a system that is not fully unicode compliant? – glaux Jun 10 '22 at 08:49
  • @glaux Even if some sort of International Standard Passport Number format was agreed, the system would still need to deal with people travelling on multiple Passports (e.g. dual nationality, or to avoid mutually inconvenient records), as well as domestic flights with different ID rules. Authority control for humans is indeed always going to have corner cases. – origimbo Jun 10 '22 at 16:12
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There are times the system will need to interact with other systems. At which point things needs to be standardized. If that system wants the first name and last name as separate fields then the airline needs to send them as separate fields.

I recently had this problem where the airline had my first name and last name, while my covid documents had first, middle, and last name. Whatever automated system the airline was using to validate my covid documents thought I was a different person. Minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things but I can imagine there are plenty of legacy systems running bits of code which require things to be in some exact order and no one is brave enough to change the code.

Rob
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  • What does the airline do if someone has only a single name, or no name at all? – Vikki Jun 09 '22 at 02:03
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    @vikki This is a very complex problem (names in IT system in general) which often leads to all kinds of issues. I'm guessing no name at all is rare and might actually mean you can't travel. Single name I believe they are in some ways capable of dealing with, using a standardized first name. – DRF Jun 09 '22 at 09:37
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    @DRF "Fnu" (stands for "First name unknown") is a very common invented first name. I've also heard of agencies that use "NA" for the first name, or put the single name in as both first and last. Occasionally, they will use MR or MS as the first name. So somebody called Deepak might be put in as DEEPAK/FNU, DEEPAK/NA, DEEPAK/MR, or DEEPAK/DEEPAK. – A. R. Feb 16 '23 at 19:25
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Because the name on the machine readable section of your passport is given in a specified order and it needs to match.

Jack Aidley
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    Machine-readable passports are a very recent invention, and by separating the name fields are simply following a long-standing trend of handling names separately. So this really comes back to "because it's always been that way". – IMSoP Jun 09 '22 at 19:58
  • @IMSoP They're not just separated, they have a fixed order so airlines must know which is which. (Except for Malaysia). And they've been around for almost 40 years, hardly "very recent" (don't confuse machine readable and biometric). – Jack Aidley Jun 09 '22 at 20:26
  • 40 years is very recent in the grand scheme of things. The major GDSes have been operating for 60 years. – IMSoP Jun 09 '22 at 20:55
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Contrary to popular belief, names (even Western names) are not self explanatory.

Compare Tucker Carlson vs. John Oliver. No, not for their respective TV programs but they actually have middle names:

  • Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson
    To me that looks like four family names! Two of which I would consider to be Nordic (-son) and a Scottish one. What if a Mr. McNear married a Ms. Carlson and they kept both names for "McNear-Carlson" naming their son "Tucker Swanson"? Then it would only be three names and a missing hyphen.
  • John William Oliver
    That's three given names! Plus, they are extremely common given names. I'm wondering why they didn't put a Harry in there, for good measure. How do you keep that apart from Oliver Peter John (who is a psychology professor at Berkeley, as my favorite search engine tells me), if both choose to not give their middle name?

Now try to find those names, e.g. on a no-fly list. And for shits and giggles don't let anyone fly whose name is Muhammad Ali (Wikipedia lists 11 celebrities, including 3 different boxers), because one of hundreds of thousands of non-celebrities with that name is listed as no-fly. Do you also want to deny all Ali Mohammads, too?

Names matter and it's bad enough with common names, no need to add more confusion by not properly distinguishing the structure.

NoAnswer
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    Sorry, but this is nonsense. If adding a hyphen between your middle and last names was enough to avoid a no-fly list, the system would be very broken indeed. As you point out, plenty of people have the same name as each other however you enter it into the system, so any system would have to have mechanisms for distinguishing them anyway. – IMSoP Jun 09 '22 at 20:02
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    That system is very broken indeed, because confusing different people is a regular and common occurance. – Remember Monica Jun 10 '22 at 04:58
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    The American habit of using a Scottish surname meaning "Son of Kenzie" as a girl's first name is the weirdest one, I think. – TRiG Jun 10 '22 at 14:49
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In the US, practically every organization that collects names of members, customers, participants, etc. asks for first and last names separately. As others have said, this makes it easier to produce formal and familiar greetings:

Hi, Joseph

Greetings, Mr. Smith

In my experience, at least 90% of web sites and paper forms have separate fields for first and last names (and sometimes also ask for the middle initial and/or suffixes like "Jr."). Forms that are intended to cater better to foreigners may designate these as personal name and family name/surname, since some cultures reverse the order (in Chinese, family names come first).

In addition, if the organization needs to look you up in other databases, being more precise about the name will generally make it easier to correlate them.

Why should airlines be any different?

Barmar
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    Maybe you should put location restrictions on your answer. It is common in Europe and where English is spoken as main language, it is likely less common outside of those areas, as naming traditions are different in different parts of the world. – Willeke Jun 08 '22 at 14:41
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    Thanks, I've added some clarifications. – Barmar Jun 08 '22 at 14:52
  • As I wrote under another answer I think the last point about correlating names is bogus, because you will always need to deal with people who don't have a standardised "surname" of this sort. In fact, your mention of suffixes is one I hadn't even thought of, as in the UK they're very rare, so I would have no idea whether to expect them in the "surname" field or not. – IMSoP Jun 09 '22 at 20:05
  • @IMSoP It's well known in the computer field that handling names in a universal way is difficult. – Barmar Jun 09 '22 at 20:12
  • @Barmar Well, quite. I don't see how forcing them into two fields rather than one makes that any easier, though. You've still got to generate all sorts of fuzzy matches where the "double-barrelled surname" in one system might be a "middle name" and "family name", or "patronymic" and "family name" in the other. – IMSoP Jun 09 '22 at 20:56
  • @IMSoP When did I ever suggest that? We generally try to divide it up in ways that try to accomodate as many cultures as reasonable. "Family name" is more general than "Last name" because it doesn't assume a particular order. – Barmar Jun 09 '22 at 21:21