Boarding-pass snafu leaves traveler at the gate

By Carol Pucci

The Seattle Times

Lewis J. Gould suspected trouble when he printed out his boarding pass for a Delta flight booked through Expedia, and saw that it listed his name as "Use Profile of Lewis J Gould."

Gould, 89, was planning to travel from his home in Saginaw, Mich., to Phoenix, for his brother's 100th birthday.

"The minute the woman checking me in (at security) went to find another officer, I knew I had a problem," Gould recalled. "She looked at the name on my driver's license which reads "Lewis John Gould," and looked at my boarding pass and said, "You can't fly with that."

The officer sent Gould to the Delta ticket counter where Gould said an agent told him that "Expedia was the only one who could change it."

Frustrated and afraid he'd miss his brother's party, he drove back home, called Delta reservations, and bought a new ticket for a flight later that day. It cost him $789, $300 more than his original fare.

Gould made it to the party, albeit with two tickets billed to his credit card.

How an obvious computer error escalated into a security breach that caused so much trouble for an 89-year-old man is baffling, but it happened, and it could happen to anyone as the Transportation Security Administration tightens its boarding-pass review process.

"If the information on the boarding pass doesn't match the ID, they will be turned away," said TSA spokesman Dwyane Baird. "Small things such as a middle initial instead of a full middle name should not cause a problem," but if there are bigger discrepancies, "they'd be sent back to the ticket counter to verify who they are."

Expedia spokesman Adam Anderson says he's not sure what went wrong. Gould could have mis-entered his ID information in the wrong field when he made his reservation in February (Gould said he didn't check on it until he printed out his boarding pass), or Expedia's reservation system could have caused the glitch.

"According to our records, this is the only case we've seen of this type of language appearing in the name field," said Anderson. "We can't confidently determine what caused it," he said, and Expedia technicians couldn't replicate the error.

Had Gould booked with Delta directly, an agent might have been able to issue a new ticket, said spokeswoman Susan Elliott. But Delta has rules, too, and "with this level of confusion, we would want that customer to go back to Expedia and sort out exactly what happened."

After months of wrangling, Gould eventually got his money back and then some. He pursued and received a refund for his original $489 ticket through his Delta/American Express credit card.

That still left him about $300 in the hole, so he sent two letters to Expedia asking to be reimbursed. When he received no response, his daughter, Susan Trapp, of Seattle, got in touch with me. I contacted Expedia, and asked that it review the case. After investigating, Expedia agreed to compensate Gould for the $739, the price of his new ticket.

Gould says he'll book his reservations by phone from now on, but the whole mess points up the need to be extra cautious when making reservations online.

Gould was turned away as the federal government was phasing in its Secure Flight watch-list matching program requiring airlines and third-party booking agents such as Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity, to collect and submit passengers' full legal names, birth dates and gender to the TSA at least 72 hours in advance of travel.

The program, fully implemented on Nov. 1, allows the TSA to check passengers' identities against 16,000 people tagged for additional scrutiny and 2,500 others on a no-fly list due to suspected terrorist threats.

The watch-list matching takes place before airlines issue boarding passes, so what happened to Gould was separate from the Secure Flight process, but it's a warning that the onus is upon travelers to make sure airlines forward the correct information to TSA and that the information on boarding passes meets TSA's ID requirements.

Gould should have gotten on the phone with Expedia as soon as he noticed the error, but it's understandable that he didn't. With all the parties involved in air travel these days — the airlines, the TSA, the online-travel agencies — it's an odd system that leaves no one in charge.

Delta issued him a boarding pass. TSA rejected it and sent him to Delta. Delta said it couldn't help and sent him back to Expedia, all within a few hours of his flight. Shouldn't there a better way?

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