Problems about flight tickets

Hello,

Today I am going to tell about some things that went wrong about our flight tickets.

Where to go?

Sydney

At first, we did not know where in Australia we were going to live, but we booked our tickets do Sydney anyway because we wanted to guarantee a good price. Some things changed and we decided to live in Brisbane.

Brisbane

The problem is: cancelling or even changing a flight ticket in Brazil is absurdly expensive. It turns out that buying another ticket from Sydney to Brisbane is cheaper than cancelling the tickets we already have. As a result, we are going from São Paulo to Sydney (with hoops in Johannesburg and Perth), and then we will get another flight to Brisbane. This decision has some implications I will discuss later.

Correcting spell errors in the name of the passengers

Here is a tough issue: we wrote my wife's first name with an extra 'R' when we did the ticket reservation. Fortunately, she can not be angry at me because she checked her own name before pressing the button.

But how can one misspelling his or her own name? It is important to take in account that my wife's name is อมรรัตน์, so any spelling using our western alphabet is wrong by definition.

Actually, it should not be a big problem. As stated in Possibilidade de correção de nome em passagem, the Brazilian Civilian Aviation National Agency considers that we can fix any name misspelling as long as we don't change the ticket ownership. OK, it may seem confusing. But they describe examples exactly like our case, when one needs to add or remove a single letter.

To sum up, neither Decolar.com (the website where we bought the tickets) nor South African Airways did anything to help us to solve the problem. At least not until we sue them at Tribunal de Pequenas Causas. But before that, I tried to solve it by phone, by complaining on Reclame Aqui and consumidor.gov.br. I will be pleased to help anyone with similar problems (really). Just send me a message.

International flights vs. domestic flights

As I mentioned before, we will flight to Sydney, and then to Brisbane. Here is the implication: baggage. Although we are leaving a lot of stuff behind, there is still a lot to take with us and, consequently, a lot of baggage. But unfortunately, the baggage policies for international flights and domestic flights are considerable different from each other. See as follows:

• International flight (South African Airways)
• 2 pieces per passenger (dispatched)
• 32 Kg per piece
• 158 cm (width + height + depth) per piece

• Domestic flight (TigerAir)
• 0 pieces per passenger included (dispatched), but we can buy it separately
• 28 Kg per piece
• 140 cm (width + height + depth) per piece

Our baggage (so far)

As a result, we will probably reduce the amount of baggage we are going to take. Another possibility is dispatching our stuff from Sydney to Brisbane by other means.

We still don't know what to do about that. Any suggestions?