Before you book
Booking a flight for someone else
Booking travel for a relative, a colleague or a client is routine, and it goes wrong in a small number of predictable ways. Nearly all of them are about names, payment or who the airline will actually talk to.
6 min readLast reviewed
The name is the part that fails
A ticket has to match the traveller's passport closely enough that the airline and the border authority accept it. Middle names, double-barrelled surnames, accented characters, suffixes and the order of given names in some naming conventions all cause problems, and the failure surfaces at check-in when nothing can be done cheaply.
Work from a photograph of the passport data page rather than from memory or from what someone tells you over the phone. Most airlines permit only a minor spelling correction after ticketing, some charge for it, and a change of passenger is generally not a correction at all — it is a cancellation and a rebooking at the current fare.
- Enter the given names and surname in the fields the airline labels for them, not as one string.
- Include a middle name only if the airline's field asks for it; some carriers require it and others reject it.
- Ignore accents and hyphens only if the passport's machine-readable zone does, and check rather than assume.
Paying with your card for someone else's ticket
Airlines treat third-party payment as a fraud risk, and their responses range from accepting it without comment to requiring a signed authorisation form with a copy of the card and the cardholder's identification presented at the airport. Some carriers void such tickets without warning.
Establish the rule before you pay rather than after. When you book through us, tell us at the quote stage that the cardholder is not the traveller and we will confirm the carrier's requirement in writing before anything is charged, so a ticket cannot be issued on a basis the airline will later reject.
Who gets told when the flight changes
Schedule changes, cancellations and gate information go to the contact details on the booking. If those are yours and you are asleep in another time zone, the traveller finds out at the airport. Put the traveller's own mobile number and email on the booking, and add yours as a secondary contact so that both of you are notified.
This matters more than it sounds. A rebooking offer sent by an airline often expires, and the person who can accept it needs to be the person who receives it.
Consent and data
To arrange the travel we need the traveller's passport details, contact details and sometimes information about their assistance or dietary needs, and we pass those to the airlines and suppliers who need them. You should have the traveller's agreement before you give us that information. Our privacy policy sets out what we collect, why, how long we hold it and how the traveller can exercise their own rights over it — send them the link along with the itinerary.
Send them the fare rules too. The person flying is the person who has to live with the change and cancellation conditions, and they should have seen them before the ticket was issued rather than after.
