The sky high price of flight name change leaves passenger reeling

Many people will be familiar with that sinking feeling that comes with realising that the name on a boarding pass, holiday booking or flight doesn’t quite match the name on the passport.

As anyone who has found themselves in this position will all too readily testify, the cost associated with what looks like a simple tweak – and oftentimes a tweak done online by the person who has made the booking and one which requires no intervention or cost whatsoever to the travel company involved – can be absolutely savage.

Airlines can demand up to €200 per flight for a name to be changed from Popey to Pope for instance and consumers have little or no choice but to pay up or miss the flight.

One reader who contacted us last autumn said he had been charged €400 to change the name on a booking for the Rugby World Cup in France and when he asked why the charge was so high he was told by the travel company involved that it was simply “a management decision”.

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He paid up but contacted us to say that he felt the charge of €200 per leg of the return flight to France was “excessive”.

Another person was charged €115 by an airline for changing the name of a booking from Chris to Christopher.

A third reader had to pay €115 to change the name on a flight from Dublin to Greece from Kathy to Kathleen and, as if that wasn’t bad enough, the company whacked on a €35 admin charge for making the small modification to the booking.

All the stories here involve different companies as does the fourth story.

“I wanted to highlight an issue I am having with Love Holidays,” began the mail we received recently from a reader.

She booked a holiday to Malta for herself and her two young children in January and while making the booking inadvertently put their middle names into the surnames box. When the confirmation booking arrived, she immediately spotted the error and went straight on to the Love Holidays app to make the modification “thinking this was a simple thing to do”.

It wasn’t.

“I was told that my only option was to cancel my current booking and rebook the same flights at a cost of approximately €400 more per passenger.”

She spoke to the airline involved and to the travel company and there was nothing that could be done for her.

“As you can imagine this is causing me a huge amount of stress, any assistance you can provide in this matter would be appreciated.”

Well, we figured we’d give it a go.

We contacted Love Holidays and initially the news we heard back was not good for our reader.

In a statement the travel company said that “many airlines do not allow anything other than minor spelling changes to passenger names once flights are booked; this is made clear on our website and on the airline’s own. Instead, tickets must be cancelled and replacements bought at the updated price. Since [our reader] contacted us, we have worked hard with the airline to reach a suitable resolution but, unfortunately, have not been able to waive the increased costs on this occasion.”

So, that seemed to be that.

However days later we heard back from Love Holidays with a surprising update. We were told that “through working with our suppliers, a waiver has been granted by the airline on the original booking and a refund of €727 has been applied to the new booking of [our reader] who has been informed of the change”.

We then heard back from the reader who was delighted and now able to look forward to her summer holiday without the cloud of the extra cost hanging over her.

It did get us thinking.

Why is it that airlines charge so much for name changes on flights?

We did a little bit more digging and found one plausible reason.

The sky high prices are imposed to stop people speculating on flights. If there was no financial penalty attached to changing the name on a flight, a person could buy a ticket well in advance at a heavily discounted price and wait until much closer to the departure date before selling it to another person at a higher price. The price would most likely climb highest if the flight was fully booked and the destination particularly sought after.

A canny operator might also be able to undercut the airline and sell a ticket for just a little less than the airline is as the departure date approaches.

All they needed to do was hit the backspace key on a keyboard and they want to charge me £220?

While the chances of this happening on a widespread basis does seem remote, airlines are reluctant to allow even the slightest possibility that such a thing might become commonplace.

This strict and expensive approach to name changes also has the added bonus of making them more money in genuine cases such as those we have outlined.

Mind you, we did come across one novel way to avoid the charges imposed by airlines. In 2015 a student in the UK changed his name by deed poll because doing so cost less than half the £220 Ryanair was seeking to amend the surname his girlfriend’s stepfather had mistakenly used in a booking.

The Guardian reported at the time that 19-year-old Adam Armstrong’s flight had been booked under the surname West and after being told how much it would cost him to change the booking he changed his name to West at no cost and got himself a new passport in his new name for £103.

“Her stepdad got my name from Facebook but I had put it as Adam West as a joke, because he was the actor who played Batman on TV,” the student told the newspaper.

“Ryanair were not helpful at all. We showed them we were not trying to change the person, just the name, but they wouldn’t back down. Ryanair pride themselves on being a customer-centric business, it just seems like a joke when they wouldn’t change the name. I just thought it was completely ridiculous. All they needed to do was hit the backspace key on a keyboard and they want to charge me £220?”

Not only did he save himself a few bob, he also gets to share a name with the original Batman for the rest of his life. And what’s not to love about that?