My 18-year-old son saved hard for a gap year trip, buying a ticket for the last leg from Fiji to London with an online agent called BudgetAir. When the electronic air ticket arrived in his inbox, it had the wrong first name on it. This isclearly not his fault as the correct name appeared on the passport information he submitted when booking. He has been told he must pay £105 to change the name on the ticket, a sum he does not have. The airline said it was BudgetAir’s responsibility to change the details on the tickets, but that a name change should only cost £50. KC, London
A mysterious error, this. Automated booking systems do not commonly reinvent names arbitrarily, but even if your son mistook his own forename you’d expect it to be flagged up when it did not match his passport information.
The airline does charge £50 to amend a ticket; the extra £55 is levied by BudgetAir, part of Dutch travel agency Travix, for submitting the changes. “Airlines do not accept complete name changes, so the original booking has to be cancelled then re-booked, taking time to try and find the same booking classes so that the overall cost of the ticket does not increase,” a Travix spokesman says. “This can involve significant additional administrative time.”
Happily, once The Observer raised the query the director of Travix rang you to apologise and accepted that something appeared to have gone amiss in the automated process. It has reissued the ticket in the correct name without the £105 charge.
If you need help email Anna Tims at your.problems@observer.co.uk or write to Your Problems, The Observer, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Include an address and phone number.
