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I have a dash in my last name. Some airlines keep the dash, some drop it and my last name becomes Namename, some convert it to a space so it becomes Name Name. My passport retains the dash and is so far the only travel documentation that does so. Interestingly its never been an issue for airlines (even if travelling with Airline A that drops the dash and Airline B that converts the dash to space, on the same ticket as happened to me recently due to carrier A rebooking an oversold flight segment onto another carrier B). Even self service passport checks is fine despite the passport having a dash and all my flight bookings missing the dash. I suspect all the systems involved just strips all the special characters and spaces and compare that way. So instead of comparing Name-Name with Namename, they just normalise it to NAMENAME vs NAMENAME which matches.



I would check what's encoded on the machine readable zone on your passport, as I understand it, the only valid characters are A-Z, 0-9, and < as a field separator.


In the MRZ, < is not a field separator; it's a filler character. So if you're Lisa Marie Presley (and "Lisa Marie" is your first name) then you probably have "PRESLEY, LISA MARIE" in the VIZ (human-readable part) and "PRESLEY<<LISA<MARIE" in the MRZ.


Indeed, the dash in my name becomes a < in the machine readable part. The field separator is indeed double <<.


I’m the second of my name. Legally lastname II.

My airline tickets always print lastnameii




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