The wife and I finally used some of our credit card points to book a flight to England. This was done through the credit card site. Everything looked fine, the confirmation I received from our credit card company had our names spelled as they are on the passports. I was supposed to enter passport information into the booking on the British Airways site, but our passports had expired, so I waited until we got both of them back to update the passenger information. BA's software is apparently special, that is, the short bus brand of special.

We don't need our customers to add their middle names when making a booking with us, but if you provided your's and when you look at your booking/e-ticket receipt it's now 'joined together' with your first name, don't worry - airline computer reservation systems aren't able to process spaces between names, so they'll always appear joined.

Similarly, this happens with double-barrelled last names, hyphenated first names and surnames with apostrophes in them (i.e. O'Connor) - our systems can't show the characters that separate the names.Again, please don't be worried about this, as airport security and passport control staff are used to seeing this and won't query that your boarding pass/e-ticket receipt differs very slightly from how your name appears in your passport. For example, it's easy for them to identify that "sarahjane" is the same as "Sarah Jane" in a passport.

https://www.britishairways.com/travel/askbainter/public/en_gb?p_faqid=3329

Okay, so that is *exactly* what happened to my wife's name (first name concatenated with middle name). But mine was extra special. The last three characters of my middle name became my first name, my first name concatenated with balance of my middle name became my middle name and my last name (miraculously) was unaffected. So, BA . com's site says they can't fix it because they didn't book it. So, I call Capital One's travel service and they tell me the booking was correct. I tried to explain that I knew my first name, middle name and last name were correct in their system because the trip confirmation email I got from them had our names correctly spelled. It was BA's flight booking names that were wrong. They assured me it wouldn't be a problem. So I emailed BA asking they confirm that it isn't going to be a problem, explaining that I'd hate to be unable to board my flight because of some poorly written software.

Anybody ever have this happen to them? If so, was it/will it be a problem?

TIA.

These tickets were "free" via CC points or I would have booked directly with the airline. But 2 grand is quite a "savings" IF it works out in the end. I have a little over a month before the flight. I'm going to give BA until Monday to reply via email (I wanted something in writing).

But your little equation helped me understand exactly how my name got so dorked up. My middle name ends in "DRA", which, it turns out, appears to be a Spanish abbreviation for "Female Doctor." So, Michael McKendra was parsed (???) to become Dra Michaelmcken, despite the fact that I had to provide my home country (USA) and my gender (male) for the same damned booking.

I had no idea such shitty software could actually make it to production.

I have it, in writing, from the airline that my boarding the flight will be unaffected by misspelled name (and inappropriate salutation) on my boarding pass.