Please or to access all these features

Add post

Watch this thread

Save thread

Start a new thread

Flip thread

Hide thread

My feed

Active Unanswered threads

Getting started FAQ's

Unanswered threads Acronyms Talk guidelines

Hide shortcut buttons

Talk

Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Feminism: chat

Flip

1 2

Original poster

Am I right to be annoyed by this?

47 replies

MervTheBigMooseHead · 20/06/2018 16:37

Not a hugely serious issue I suppose but it's pissed me off...

So I've just booked flights with Thomas Cook. Put my details in first, as you would, used my credit card to pay... got the confirmation email through and it's all addressed to my husband. They've listed him as the lead passenger and put my title as Mrs (I've never used Mrs, and we don't even share a surname!). I've gone (possibly irrationally?) apoplectic! I can forgive the title but addressing the correspondence to him... really?!

Husband is looking at me like I'm mad!

OP posts:

Clairexx1 · 20/06/2018 21:52

Does his surname come before yours the me alphabet? I work for an airline and usually they regroup the passengers names alphabetically, adults first then children)
I always book our holidays, through the airline I work for, yet because my partners surname starts with C and mine is M then he automatically becomes lead passenger!

Original poster

MervTheBigMooseHead · 20/06/2018 21:58

Claire Yes it does, and that was my first thought after going ballistic, but the booking pdf is set out like a proper letter, Thomas Cook details address top right, our address on the left, with his name there. Surely that should be to the person who made the booking. Otherwise it could be addressed to a child or similar.

OP posts:

butlerswharf · 20/06/2018 22:04

In the minority on this but this just wouldn't bother me at all.

PremierNaps · 20/06/2018 22:07

Did you enter your DHs name first? If so then yes he would be lead passenger

NotTakenUsername · 20/06/2018 22:11

This sounds like a glitch in communication between third party and Thomas cook.

I have booked directly with Thomas cook and put myself on as the lead passenger as always. No issues - I just double checked the old emails to make sure.

CourtneyLovely · 20/06/2018 22:22

A friend of mine had problems with the flights she'd booked for her and her DH because it was all confirmed and tickets issued to "Dr and Mrs X" instead of how she'd booked it, which was "Dr and Mr X" because she's the bloody doctor! Not sure which airline it was, one of the budget ones I think, but they wanted her to pay to put it right!

Reader, she didn't pay to rectify their mistake...

Original poster

MervTheBigMooseHead · 20/06/2018 22:24

butler hence my asking - I wasn't sure whether it was worth being bothered by but it's the latest in a series of small incidents. On the surface, I agree, it's fairly minor

Premier Username nope, my name first, and other carrier from the same booking addressed me, hence my conclusion that the problem was Thomas Cook.

OP posts:

Ohyesiam · 20/06/2018 22:27

Yanbu, and do email them. They should know the effect they are having.

PandaPieForTea · 20/06/2018 22:31

I’ve had things like this. Hotels seem to be particularly poor. They try to do the ‘extra touch’ approach and then cock it up. I book everything for holidays, but we’ve had welcome messages on the TV ‘Welcome Mr Tea’. The weirdest one was a welcome card addressed to Mr Panda Tea. I have a very standard woman’s first name and it was an English speaking country where they would have known that, so putting my title as Mr was so odd.

ErrolTheDragon · 21/06/2018 00:21

Legacy banking software may well be a mess, but I doubt that has any bearing at all on travel booking systems and whether there's any excuse for some of them mangling bookings in a sexist way. (Perl wasn't even invented till 1987 -you program in it if you have to by a mixture of googling and swearing IME- and FORTRAN was used by scientists not for financial software ... I'm not sure relief knows much about it)

thebewilderness · 21/06/2018 00:24

The airline turned me into my brothers wife once when I booked flight for us to visit mum.
They have a discriminatory system for treating women and they do not really care what the law says.

bunbunny · 21/06/2018 00:28

Was just going to say that it might be worth pointing this out to them in writing or on twitter - particularly if you don't ever use Mrs and it's not in your passport - assuming the flights mean you need to use your passport. hopefully they have kept your surname correctly... but worth checking to make sure that you will still be able to fly on the booking and that they won't be charging you to rectify their mistakes if not... and remember to take any correspondence about this with you!

chocolatesprinkle · 21/06/2018 00:28

My estate agents do it too.

Made a huge fuss of me being the lead tenant, my income is more than his etc etc. Who do you think they now email? Who do you think they phone?

ReliefOfChaos · 21/06/2018 07:00

I don't know much about Perl, Errol. I do know that one major travel agency has their entire system coded in Perl though, which is why I mentioned it.

littlecabbage · 21/06/2018 07:20

Yes, please DO email them. It may seem a little thing to them but it is damaging to equality when it seeps through everything. When I recently booked flights with BA, I was then named as lead passenger - would definitely have complained if not.

BlackeyedSusan · 21/06/2018 07:26

I bought a car. with my money. I took ex as he needed to drive us to the garage 50 miles away.

got the paperwork, car now belonged to mr, male version of my name, surname. had to send it to the dvla what a faff.

pinkmagic1 · 21/06/2018 07:32

I work in travel and have never had this happen to any customers on our in house or third party booking system. The lead name we enter is always the lead name on the paperwork.
I always ask couples who they want to nominate as the lead name. I would say 90 percent of women just sit there meekly and say 'Him'. It really annoys me.

Magliarosa · 21/06/2018 07:37

This sort of thing is so frustrating. I had a joint bank account and of course my (now-ex) DH was listed as lead name, when the bank went public guess who's name all the shares were issued in? Wasn't a problem while we were still married as the dividends went in to the joint account but once we split he kept the shares and as far as I know is still profiting from them. I could have tried to claim half in the divorce but it didn't seem worth it at the time. Still winds me up though that he was automatically given something that I wasn't - as were all the men with joint accounts.

After we divorced I bought a house on my own and was renovating it. I had a couple of double glazing companies who came to quote who were told it was all just me and my money but still wrote the quote out to Mr Maglia (who had nothing to do with the house at all). Needless to say they didn't get the work. Annoyingly the ones who did do the work were fine all the way through the process until the final stage when they issued the FENSA certificate with a cover letter addressed to Mr Maglia, I was not happy.

I've never had a travel company do this though, although me and DP don't share a name. But we do have several bank accounts together where he is listed as lead name even though mine is first alphabetically.

It is so endemic in people/systems etc that we need to challenge it every time and maybe this sort of thing will eventually die out.

Marmelised · 21/06/2018 07:39

BT once changed my business phone line into my husband’s name without my permission.

I worked from home and set up a separate line for my office. They phoned the home line and asked my husband if he would like both bills in same name (had previously refused to let us have both names on domestic bill so it was in his name only). He wasn’t thinking and said yes so I then had my business calls on same bill, addressed to someone who had nothing to do with my business (apart from being married to me).

I had phoned BT in the first place, I had set up the phone line, provided bank details etc and they changed it all round on the telephone say so of a different person. He still doesn’t fully understand why I was cross.

Weezol · 21/06/2018 07:46

Email and Twitter shame. Unless requested, the communication should be in the name of the cardholder in order to conform with data security legislation?

I'm very, very anti-title. My marital status is irrelevant to pretty much everything until after I die and my estate has to comply with inheritance laws.

I try to avoid using a title wherever possible, but on forms that insist, I usually tick 'Doctor'. As long as I'm not seeking to gain anything by doing this, it's fine. If it becomes a problem I'll buy a doctorate on line just like a certain tv 'nutritionist' did.

A doctorate from the College of Interplanetary Relations was only about $75 last time I checked.

Ofew · 21/06/2018 08:00

Uggghhh, I hate this. It's not happened to me with airlines but it has in other things. Solicitors spring to mind when moving house, despite me doing ALL of the correspondence with them. And preschool, ffs, when I was a SAHP and so 90% of the time it was me on the school run/baking for the fete/etc etc.
TBH I let it go with preschool because they're otherwise lovely and took great care of our kids, and they're run by volunteers. But big companies like that need to know it's not on!

Original poster

MervTheBigMooseHead · 21/06/2018 10:09

Ugh! This is why I'm so pissed off - it's a really ingrained attitude, isn't it?!

I've written an email but now my blood is boiling because it seems impossible to find a simple email address. I'm stuck in a loop of "click here for details" only to taken back to the FAQ page. Argh! I think I might have to go old school and write a letter! I don't have twitter...

OP posts:

Flip

1 2