Travel: The Thomassons were penalised for a simple spelling error

"WHAT A jolly expensive `s' ", says Kate Thomasson of Edinburgh, after a single letter was omitted from her surname on her family's travel documents to Spain. They had booked a Costa del Sol holiday by telephone. The tickets arrived in the name of Thomason. What's in a letter, you might wonder?

A pounds 25 charge per person, it turns out, to restore the errant `s'. Her travel agent, Lunn Poly of Frederick Street in the Scottish capital, told the Thomassons that this was the normal fee, but after The Independent became involved in the case, the charge was waived.

Holiday companies levy a fee to change the name of a passenger, usually when a different person is travelling (incidentally, this courtesy is not available to scheduled airline passengers). But the Thomasson family were penalised for a simple spelling error which could well not have even been their fault.

How likely is it that they would have been prevented from travelling? "Very," said the travel agent. But as someone who once flew across America with a boarding pass announcing me to be "Sandra Calderon", I am not so sure. A large reservoir of discretion sloshes around the travel industry - it has to, or the whole global business could grind to a halt.

On a typical holiday flight of 300 people, it would be surprising if everyone turned up with a ticket that exactly matched their passport details and the computer record. Usually, the airline will allow people through despite inconsistencies.

My pal Constantine Charalambous endures many anagrams made of his name, but always seems to travel; last month he flew to Mexico with a visa showing his gender as feminina, even though he is a 6ft-6in man.

And Rhiannon Batten, who writes for these pages, has been addressed as both Rena Button and Richard Batten on some of the many exciting press releases we have received this week.

THE BEST way to avoid your name being mis-spelt on a ticket is to opt for "ticketless" travel, where you are given a six-digit code of letters (known as the PNR or "locator") to quote at check-in.

I had always assumed that the airlines weed out unfortunate combinations of letters, in the same way that off-colour permutations of letters on car number plates are excised. But no: booking an electronic ticket for a Heathrow to Manchester hop, I was told to quote the code SS DEAD.