What to do if your name is typed backwards? 8 things you must know after snagging a budget airline ticket

▲ Vanilla Air. (Photo / from Vanilla Air’s official Facebook page)

Reported by Chen Rui-zhong / Taipei

Recently, budget airlines including Vanilla Air, Scoot, and TransAsia Airways have launched a series of promotional offers. Among them, Vanilla Air’s promo tickets for Taipei–Osaka at just NT$288 caused the airline’s official website to crash for two consecutive days due to overwhelming traffic. However, many people who successfully booked their tickets later faced various issues such as incorrect English names, wrong gender entries, or wrong travel dates.

To help more travelers understand the issues related to booking promotional tickets, ETtoday EVA Air Travel Cloud used Vanilla Air’s recent promotion as an example to list common problems faced by customers, giving consumers a better understanding of the procedures and fees involved with budget airlines.

Vanilla Air promotional ticket guidelines (subject to individual airline policies)
1. How do you know if your booking is successful?
Although passengers may receive a notification SMS or email from their credit card company after booking, the “receipt of a booking confirmation email from the airline” is what ultimately counts. If you haven’t received a confirmation email, you can also call customer service to confirm.

2. Double bookings
Many people open multiple web pages or encounter operational or connectivity issues, so if you accidentally book “the exact same flight ticket” multiple times, you can call customer service to cancel the extras. However, a payment handling fee will still apply.

3. Correcting name misspellings
a. Changing a name after booking: A modification fee of NT$300 applies; correcting it at the counter incurs an additional NT$600.
b. First name and last name reversed: This can be corrected by calling customer service, free of charge.
c. Accidentally adding spaces or hyphens: As long as all the letters in the English name are correct and identifiable, you can still pass through security.

▲ You have not completed the booking process until you receive the booking confirmation email.

4. Incorrect gender
Call customer service to correct it for free.

5. Incorrect birth date
Call customer service to correct it for free.

6. Wrong baggage weight selected
If the selected baggage weight is insufficient, you can log in online to add more baggage before departure, but you cannot cancel or get a refund for already purchased baggage allowances.

7. Booking shows a reservation code, but no confirmation email is received
This could be due to an incorrect contact email or the email being filtered into the spam/junk folder. You can use the reservation code to check on the official website or contact customer service again to confirm.

8. Accidental booking and cancellation
Promotional tickets are not eligible for free refunds, but if the ticket has not been used, you can apply for a refund of the airport tax within 30 days after the departure date.