I was nervous about this kind of thing on a flight I took two years ago. We purchased the tickets from Delta, using skymiles points. The flights were on the partner airline, Alitalia. Our passports use full middle names and that's how I had made the flight reservation. However, the tickets did not follow suit. My middle name had the last letter left off, and my husband's ticket had just his middle initial, not full middle name, and the middle initial was tacked onto the first name with no space in between. I called Delta. Delta didn't think the names on the tickets would be an issue at all. The missing letter on my middle name was a "space issue" and is common. The use of an initial for my husband, tacked onto the end of his first name, was not a problem either, they said. It's commonly seen. I was concerned, nevertheless, and asked if they could reissue the tickets with full, correct names. They refused because the flights, while booked with a Delta reservation agent, were on Alitalia. They said I could call Alitalia. I asked Delta if I could just cancel and rebook, since we were still within the 24 hour grace period for cancellation, and they said this was possible, but the low level award seats that we had gotten were no longer available for our date, so the new booking would require many more points. I decided I'd be okay leaving them as is if Alitalia reiterated what Delta said, i.e., it wasn't going to be an issue. I got no such assurance from Alitalia. When I called, I was told that the names must exactly match or we could be denied boarding. Alitalia would not reissue the tickets with corrected names (even though I was still within the 24 hour grace period) because the booking was through Delta. They said Delta would have to do it. I ended up with a satisfactory solution in the next conversation that I had with Delta. An agent told me that she would put "notes" on the reservation, in the "secure passenger information" that is attached to each ticket reservation. The secure passenger info attached to our ticket numbers would list our full middle names, and therefore, we were told, there would be no issue when we checked in with tickets that didn't use the full middle names. The end of the story is that those flights on Alitalia were not an issue at all. Had check-in been a problem, I was prepared to direct the agent to the "secure passenger information" but never had to do that. No one expressed any concern whatsoever with the way our tickets read.
