JAL Booking Error: Total length of first name plus last name plus date of birth is too long
Today my wife and I encountered an error attempting to book flights to Japan on Japan Airlines (JAL). After correctly filling out the passenger details for the desired return journey, we were presented with the following curious error:
Total length of first name plus last name plus date of birth is too long. Please modify your entry and try again. (1160)
We had previously booked directly with JAL on multiple occasions and never had this issue before.
From a user experience perspective, this is error message is pretty daunting. The core error message is incredibly system-oriented, takes a few reads to figure out, and causes us to ask why the form even tried to concatenate those things in the first place. I mean, to what end are names and date of birth even being concatenated at all!? And why would I want to know about that as a user? Also, how can a user modify their entry here when most airlines dictate your personal details must be an exact match for the information on your passport? The suggested remedial action seems likely to land you in trouble at the gate!
JAL state the character limits for names in their FAQ, but none our our names fall foul of these! Being the internet dependent people that we are, we searched the error message and the first hit lead us to this flyertalk post. The first line of the post from a similarly afflicted user states the following: “trying to book BKK - MNL one way with lap child”. This highlighted the only difference compared to our previous bookings – we had a brand new infant to book for! We realized that this must be the cause of the error.
My wife called JAL to sort the booking over the phone and the customer service representative noted that for infant tickets, the data for the infant and associated parent are concatenated and this is what caused the form validation error. I’m sure we’ve all been guilty of some adding unclear error messages to a codebase, but this one was a real highlight! The booking section for each passenger was its own discrete box, including the one for the infant. So the error message hid the magic operations the form was doing to the data before providing an puzzling error message that suggested to fix the error by doing something you definitely should not try to do.
Thinking through the backend of this form, I can only assume that there is a 1:1 relationship between seats and tickets. Consequently, infants are simply appended to their parent’s ticket because the infants themselves don’t actually need a seat. In the unlikely event that anyone with experience writing airline ticket booking software is reading this, please feel free to email and enlighten me!
The experience was a useful reminder about descriptive error messages. We should remember to state the immediate issue and provide useful hints about how to fix it if we cannot automatically fix it ourselves. Ideally in this case, if we were unable to relax the name length restrictions, we would report something like "It looks like you are travelling with an infant, please call us on 0800-baby-on-board for assistance".
In the end, the customer service team were able to resolve everything quickly, and, if the usual experience is anything to go by, the food served on board will more than make up for any potential infant booking inconvenience!