What to do if one member of the family can't fly on booked flight

[LostInTranslations]

Sorry couldn't phrase it well in the title!

Myself, my partner and my two children are due to fly on Monday. I've been sent a link from the airline to check in online, but my partner now has to work and can't make the flight. It's flight only and cheap so he's not worried about losing the money, but my question is do I just check us all in and he just doesn't turn up on the day? Or do I try and change something now? There is an option to cancel the flight, but that seems to be for the whole booking and not just for one individual person.

Annoyingly, even though I booked the flight, and it's on my frequent flyer number etc, because he is a man he is the lead person on the booking. (I'll be complaining about that separately - how bloody stupid!)

Anyway, any ideas welcome! I will try and call them tomorrow but don't hold out much hope of actually getting to talk to someone!

ok - name and shame this airline

where a female traveller inputs their details in as the lead traveller

but the system overrides this and automatically has the male as the lead traveller

I can't be 100% sure but I'd suspect it's something to do with the title and the system re-jigging them into alphabetical order, than deliberately because someone on the booking is male. Especially likely in a small airline without the sophisticated systems of big players.

Wait until you find out that in the background systems for airlines you're all 'Mrs' no matter what you entered when booking, because 'Mrs' denotes adult female and allocates an average weight accordingly

Is your DH's name alphabetically before yours? DS1 always appears as lead traveller, even when he was a child and on flights booked by his father.

🤔 m
Didn’t think the op would name the airline that ignores any female as lead traveller and overrides so a male is the lead traveller

why? Because no such airline exists

@GiveupHQ the exact same thing has happened to a friend of mine, except it’s her son that has been made lead traveller.

May be an alphabetical rather than gender thing, as PP said, but clearly a teenager didn’t make the booking.