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.
Coming from Malaysia, I have quite the non-standard order of names with my surname being the in the center. It gets more complicated because most Malaysians don’t have a surname, so none of our official documents have a Surname / Firstname field, just a Name field.
Flight tickets always look bizarre because the order is off, and bits of the last part of my name is taken off. Surprisingly this has never been a problem with the airlines in Europe / NA / Asia. The only EU country to give me a grilling about the name was at the Italian border.
As I was holding a visa in the U.K. since 2010s, the home office’s compromise with me was to list my whole name as my last name. Thereby making documents in the U.K. match my passport name. Although since about 2 years ago, they’ve finally relented and recognised my last name as such.
Another odd side effect of this is that I have 2 credit scores, depending on the name order.