Amr Eladawy has personally contacted GDS but been ignored. Sadly, this is one of those situations where getting a lawyer to send a letter to them probably would work. A bug that affects a group of minorities with a mention of interfering with the US Constitution right to travel with a hint of possible class action will tend to fix this type of bug. I don't like bug-report-via-lawyer but it does work.
The GDS systems have worked like this forever, and likely this won't ever change. The GDS can claim the issue is on the travel agent side, who should have written the lastname as AMRMR.
Having said that it clearly sucks and is super confusing and annoying to affected people, especially given the horrendous prices some airlines demand to change the name on the booking etc.
It seems like a small thing and I'm hypothesizing but I'm pretty sure no one sane at time will risk changing this, deploying to prod and hoping that nothing breaks. There's hundreds of airlines and thousands of travel agents involved.
The rule about having a title after the name without any separator is clearly a bad design, but now you have decades of systems (and hacks) built on top of it, you can't just change it like that overnight. In the same way as you can't change how certain broken web APIs work because there's too many websites that rely on that broken behaviors.
Yet another, more local and fixable issue is the airline app which doesn't allow 1-letter last names. This is the same as the apps which helpfully validate email address and reject many valid emails. The best regex for validating emails is /@/. Anything else is probably broken.
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Another big issue in the industry is that PNRs are 6-digit long and sequentially generated over time, which is a security problem, as demonstrated by CCC a few years ago. If you know someone's name and that they're flying on a given date with a given airline, you can try to brute-force-guess their PNR number and get their personal data or even change their reservation. Again, this is so rooted into the systems that it can't be changed without a massive industry collaboration - probably a years-long project with $$$ cost. For now the GDS have anti-bruteforce mechanisms in place, but it's not good enough solution IMO for a determined attacker.
> given the horrendous prices some airlines demand to change the name
In practice airlines are fairly lenient concerning misspellings, out of order names, missing diacritics, etc. The name change fee applies mostly to changing the person who is flying.
I have a one letter first name and Air New Zealand refused to book me with only one letter in my name and then equally refused to change it when it caused problems later matching my frequent flier mile account on another airline without charging the ridiculous name change fee, which the airline agent at the desk said the computer system would not allow her to waive.
I'm not talking about computer systems. It is trivial to write code to handle an arbitrary UTF-8 string. I mean for his own sake, it's probably best to have a real name.
Do you even realize how rude and offensive this suggestion sounds? For most people their name is quite a large part of their identity, it's not on you (or developers of the protocols in question for that matter) to decide what does or does not constitute a "real name".
The mere fact that you're reading about these cases here should be good enough of an indication that they're indeed not seeing it as a waste of time.
But how much time would then be wasted writing/typing out all of those extra letters in their name? Then, dealing with updating every account they have. Your sarcastic response wsan't even well thought out. Developer's time is expensive to waste in a gov't office to address a bug left from their parents.
I was not being sarcastic whatsoever. I know two people who have changed their name because they didn't like the name they were born with. My suggestion is 100% dead serious.
Right. The GDS systems doing anything other than pointing the finger at a third party (like, say, fixing the bug) might be seen as admitting responsibility. In fact, this is a good way to ensure that the bug never gets fixed.
If Sabre has enough money to send Bill Clinton and Mark Ronson to Hawaii for a glorified frat party [0], it has enough money to tear through all but the best-funded legal challenges. (You'd think I'm joking. Nope.)
Just because nutjobs like to try to invoke constitutional rights doesn't mean those rights don't exist and can't be helpfully invoked. The stereotypical nutjob-invoking-constitutional-rights move is to respond to every police encounter by asking, "am I being detained?", but sometimes you're better off asking that question.
He kind of has a point, though -- I agree the right to travel does not specify a specific mode of travel and should cover planes, but then pretty much everything that goes on w.r.t. planes and cars is unconstitutional.
(Consider that while the government definitely has the right to tax you for road use, requiring you provide an ID to prove you paid a tax is like requiring you to carry an ID proving you paid your federal income tax, or requiring an ID to exercise free speech.)
"Am I being detained" is level 1 nutjob stuff, fairly normal. Incorrectly invoking a "right to travel" is advanced nutjob. It will immediately make a lawyer think you're a sovereign citizen since that's a cornerstone of their legal philosophy.
Its from the "Privileges and Immunities Clause" of the US Constitution and has shown up in many court cases. What may seem "nutjob" to you might have a whole different meaning to the lawyer you have hired to protect your company. Which is why you really want to make sure the letters that you get from lawyers are ran by a lawyer even if they seem a bit off.
To be fair, we don't know if the problem is being ignored, or just isn't in the current sprint.
Think about how this would go on your team. Customer service sends in a ticket to your Product owner, complaining that a customer has a problem, and called in not only reporting it, but telling you exactly what their expected fix was. Even if the team acknowledged the problem and wanted to fix it, would it really be bumped to the #1 priority, and would the team really just take the fix from the customer instead of designing their own solution?
Or would it be triaged and prioritized, taking into account all other product and customers needs at the same time?
I'm not arguing that airline customer service is great. But a post on stackexchange venting about a customer service team's lack of communication gives us zero insights into what is really going on.
The post said that it had been working fine for 6 years, and this is a new, recent bug. Or, more specifically, that the problem's workaround is no longer valid recently because of the new bug that requires longer names.
These PNRs are stored on mainframes running software written in COBOL which has not been touched for years. The actual PNR is a flat text document with semi-structured lines as explained in the article.
We never make changes to the mainframes, we just wrap the functionality. The structure of a line cannot change as the industry relies on all airlines using the same structure. If a new "field" needs to be added to the PNR we add it as an "RM" (remark) entry.
I dunno about you, but I always liked the practice of having an on-call rotation (even if you weren't actually on call) so someone would be able to pick up minor bug fixes without them getting in the forever backlog.
