Collect the passenger's name exactly as it appears on the travel document (passport or national ID) they will use — do not infer from a user profile or email address without explicit confirmation.
Most airlines accept Latin characters only on tickets; for passengers whose documents use non-Latin scripts (Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic), use the romanized name from the machine-readable zone (MRZ) of the passport.
Remove or transliterate special characters that airline reservation systems cannot process: accented characters (é→E, ü→UE per ICAO), hyphens in given names (Anne-Marie → ANNEMARIE or ANNE MARIE depending on carrier), and apostrophes (O'Brien → OBRIEN).
Split name into surname and given name(s) as separate fields — do not concatenate into a single string; middle names are typically included in the given name field and must not be omitted if on the travel document.
Titles (Mr, Mrs, Dr) are stored in a separate title field in booking APIs — do not prepend them to the name string, as this causes name mismatch at check-in.
After creating the booking, display the ticketed name back to the user for confirmation before payment is captured; name changes after ticketing are expensive or impossible on most carriers.
Known gotchas
Infant names must exactly match the birth certificate or passport used at the airport — using a nickname or shortened form will cause check-in problems even if the airline does not verify documents at booking time.
Some carriers enforce a maximum name length (e.g. 35 characters total for surname + given name in some GDS systems); truncation must follow ICAO rules and be disclosed to the passenger.
Double-barrelled surnames (e.g. Smith-Jones) are treated inconsistently across carriers — some require the hyphen, others strip it; check the specific airline's name format requirements before submitting.
Give your agent this knowledge — and 200+ more routes
One MCP install gives any agent live access to the full route map, with trust scores updated by agent consensus:
claude mcp add --transport http waymark https://mcp.waymark.network/mcp