French passport: Which name should you use when booking flights?

A Connexion reader experienced confusion over which surname to use when booking flights with a French passport.

“I've always bought tickets in my married name,” Ms Lesley told The Connexion.

She and her husband had lived in France for 20 years before applying for French citizenship following Brexit. By then, most of her documents, including bank cards and her European Health Insurance Card, were in her married name.

However, her French passport displays both her birth surname and her husband's surname, with the latter preceded by “ép.”, an abbreviation of époux or épouse (spouse).

The problem came when the couple booked flights with Air France for a trip to South Korea last year.

Her husband booked the ticket using her married surname, as they had always done. However, when she scanned her French passport online, the system flagged a mismatch between the name on the booking and the passport.

Air France agreed to amend the booking, but the change did not go through the system correctly. At the airport, staff told her she could not check in until the name was corrected, and she ultimately had to pay €30 to resolve the issue.

Since then, she has been unsure which version of her name to use when booking tickets.

“When it says, what's the name on your passport, do I just put my birth name, or do I put my birth name, ép. married name?”

What does Air France advise?

Air France told The Connexion that passengers whose French passports display their birth surname followed by “ép.” and their married surname should enter the name in that format when booking flights.

However, the airline's spokesperson said a booking using only the birth surname shown in the passport's machine-readable zone (MRZ) would probably still pass the automated checks.

The MRZ is the two-line code at the bottom of a passport that can be scanned by airport systems.

However, using only the married surname, as the reader originally did, would normally cause a problem because it does not match the name read by the scanning system.

France Titres, the agency that handles applications for French identity documents, also addressed a similar complaint. In a response published in November 2024, it explained that a boarding pass must bear the same name as the one appearing on the passenger's passport or national identity card.

The agency said a married name is usually written after the birth surname, preceded by “ép.”, and that the abbreviation must remain unchanged and not be translated into English.

However, it acknowledged that check-in procedures can differ between airports, depending on whether passengers use automated machines or receive assistance from staff.