Lufthansa Name Change and Correction Policy: What Is Allowed

Timing changes the difficulty more than the policy does

Read the name on the confirmation the day it arrives. It takes thirty seconds and it is the only reliable way to keep this simple and inexpensive.

Married, divorced and legally changed names

• The passport is the document that counts for international travel. If it still shows your former name, that is the name to travel in.
• If the passport has been renewed in the new name, the ticket must match the new passport.
• If the change happens between booking and travel, that is a correction, and documentation — a marriage certificate, a divorce decree, a court order — will usually be required.
• Renew the passport first and book second where you can. Doing it the other way round means paying to correct a ticket you have already bought.

European naming conventions worth knowing

On European itineraries a few patterns cause more corrections than anything else:

• Umlauts and accented characters. German, Scandinavian and other European passports carry characters that airline systems transliterate — ü commonly becomes ue, ö becomes oe, ß becomes ss. The machine-readable zone at the bottom of the passport shows how the document itself renders them, and that is the version to use.
• Double-barrelled and hyphenated surnames, which should be entered as they appear, hyphen included.
• Name particles — van, von, de, della — which are part of the surname and belong in the surname field rather than treated as a middle name.
• Long names that exceed the field length. There is an established convention for this and it is better handled at booking than corrected later.

If your name involves any of these, booking by phone is worth the few minutes. Getting it right at the outset costs nothing; correcting it afterwards costs time and sometimes money.

What to do if the name is wrong now

1. Have the passport in front of you — the document itself, not your recollection of it.
2. Write down the exact difference between booking and passport.
3. Establish whether it is a correction or a transfer.
4. Find out who operates each leg before you call, so the conversation covers the whole ticket.
5. Call rather than email. A phone agent can see and amend the record while you are on the line.
6. Get confirmation in writing that the correction has applied to every sector.

What it actually costs to leave it

• You may be refused at check-in. The agent cannot issue a boarding pass against a passport that does not match the record.
• Airport staff are working a live departure, and the authority to amend a record is not always at the desk.
• On a two-carrier ticket the problem can surface at the connection, far from home and with fewer options.
• If you miss the flight, the fare rules apply as though you simply did not travel, which is a much more expensive outcome than a correction.
• Travelling companions usually continue without you.

Checking the name before you ever need this page

Every correction in this guide is avoidable, and the habit that avoids it takes less than a minute.

When the confirmation email arrives, open the passport alongside it and compare four things:

• The surname, including any particle such as van or von, and any hyphen.
• The given names, in the order the passport shows them, not the order you say them.
• Any middle name on the data page, which should appear on the ticket.
• The spelling of accented characters against the machine-readable zone at the foot of the page.

Then check the passport itself: the expiry date, and whether it has enough validity left for the destination. A surprising number of name problems are discovered at the same moment as an expiry problem, and the expiry one takes far longer to solve.

Do this for every traveller on the booking, not just your own. On a family or group record the names were often typed in one sitting from memory, and if one is wrong the others frequently are too.

How Fond Travels can help

• We identify which problem you have — correction or transfer — which decides every subsequent step.
• We check who operates each leg and make sure a correction reaches all of them, which is the part that goes wrong on this airline more than any other.
• We make the call rather than leaving you on hold, and we chase the confirmation.
• We check the name against the passport at the time of booking, which is when this problem costs nothing at all.
• We handle names with particles, accents and hyphens so they are entered the way the passport renders them.

If the name on a booking does not match the passport, call +1 (323) 800 6001. A travel expert answers any hour.