Gold Medal Travel, a UK-based travel agency, is holding a woman’s ticket hostage. Even though Northwest airlines says the ticket will be fine and they have no policy like what Gold Medal claims, Gold Medal says the ticket will be forfeited if the woman doesn’t give them an extra $200 to correct a typo.

My girlfriend is Swedish and lives in Sweden, while I am here in the States. She recently booked a ticket through Gold Medal Travel to come see me later in April for a fairly decent price, but soon after received a call from the Travel Agency stating that her name was incorrect on the ticket and she would have to pay over $200 to correct it. Now, in this day and age I can understand your ticketed name needing to match your passport, however, her name isn’t misspelled, her last name was simply repeated. Just to be clear here, in the “first name” box she entered her full name and in the “last name” box she put only her last name. Obviously this didn’t seem like a $200 mistake to me so I tried to get to the root of the problem. I called Northwest, who was INCREDIBLY helpful, and was told that not only should she not be charged for a simple name change, but that as her name reads now she shouldn’t have any problems. Finding no resolution I managed to find the number for Gold Medal Travel to try my luck with them. Now according to them, under the contract they have with the airlines (Northwest and KLM) they are forced to charge the exorbitant fee and will not even issue her the ticket until she pays this extra fee.
 
This is unacceptable. She paid for the ticket over 2 weeks ago and was just told this week about this “name mistake.” Now we have to come up with $200 or else the entire ticket is forfeited. Please help us, what recourse do we have?
 

Quinn, can your girlfriend call KLM and find out whether or not they’re behind the ridiculous requirement? If they too say no, then we think your girlfriend needs to lodge official complaints at the appropriate agency within her own country. She may want to also check the fine print of the agreement to see whether the fee was mentioned there—if so, she might not have any recourse other than to pay it, regardless of whether or not Gold Medal Travel tries to blame it on an airline.
 
Readers, any suggestions? Do any of you know more about Gold Medal Travel or how to contest a last-minute $200 fee for a ticket?
 
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Gold Medal Travel
Konsumentverket/KO (The Swedish Consumer Agency)
(Photo: Getty)

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