Surely one of the least delightful experiences of travel is when you need to make changes to your itinerary. It feels like, sometimes, the airlines will do everything in their power to make it difficult. As if travel itself isn’t stressful enough. (Tip: we have found Air Canada and, using Expedia’s online teams, to be very helpful and responsive.)
As a general rule airlines don’t let you change the name on a ticket. If you could swap names, you could resell tickets, and that would undermine airline pricing strategies that try to charge more for the kind of last minute travel usually purchased by business travelers.
That’s also why airlines started insisting on ID’ing travelers, to make sure their tickets weren’t being resold. The government didn’t impose an airline ID requirement until 1996 as a way of looking like they were ‘doing something’ after the TWA flight 800 accident that some at the time thought might have been terrorism-related.
However there are times you need to fix the name on a ticket, and times you need to change the name on a ticket altogether. Read more here from the ever-helpful Gary Leff and his excellent site ViewFromTheWing.com
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