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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
For flights, you’re probably fine. For visas, it might depend on the country
Pretty sure there is a character limit on plane ticket. So I wouldn’t worry too much. People with 5 “first name” can’t just put the 5
