ESTA glitch with surname

[Maurice]

The SO had a terrible time at Heathrow this morning. Booked on a BA
flight to Newark(USA) she was refused boarding because BA had no ESTA
number for her booking, although she had applied for one weeks ago and
had an email from ESTA confirming the application had been successful
and providing a .pdf file of the confirmation - a hard copy of which
she presented at checkin, so presumably there was some glitch between
ESTA and BA.
So because she had to re-apply for an ESTA there and then, it was too
late for the booked flight, and had to rebook on a later flight.

What appears to have happened is that when ESTA informed BA of the ESTA
number they used her name as entered in the ESTA application (and as
appears on passport) - which happens to have a 3-word surname. but BA -
as with other airlines - can handle only 1-word surnames (so have to
concatenate multi-word surnames into one long word).
Result: The ESTA-BA interface failed to match the 3-word
surname with BA's concatenated surname, so refused boarding...

Unbelievable...

Question is, what redress is available?

--
/\/\aurice (Retired in Hampshire)
(Replace "nomail.afraid" by "bcs" to reply by email)

[Roland Perry]

In message <o14iig$10f$1...@dont-email.me>, at 17:10:40 on Wed, 23 Nov
2016, Maurice <mau...@nomail.afraid.org> remarked:

Worth asking the question in uk.legal.moderated, I've set the follow-up.
--
Roland Perry

[Maurice]

On Wed, 23 Nov 2016 17:10:40 +0000, I wrote:

> What appears to have happened

Further investigation points to ESTA having *lost* the SO's application,
so BA's system could not find it, so refused boarding (despite being
presented at checkin with a printed copy of the ESTA 'application
authorized' .pdf document).

[When we went onto the ESTA web site to 'refer to' the application, their
system could not find it...]

--
/\/\aurice

[Maurice]

On Fri, 25 Nov 2016 11:39:11 +0000, I wrote:

> [When we went onto the ESTA web site to 'refer to' the application,
> their system could not find it...]

Seems the SO accidentally used a fraudulent ESTA site, which explains
why neither BA nor ESTA could find the apparently successful
application.

If you look here: http://tinyurl.com/j8epy3y

you will see:

"This is one of the websites to avoid -
https://www.esta-registration.co.uk/
It supposedly belongs to a company named Sherpatec with
offices in Munich, Geneva, Hong Kong etc but it is a
total fraud - no email addresses work. Please be careful
- this is an extremely clever operation"

This is the official ESTA web site: https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov/esta/

Seems a lot of people have been caught out on this kind of fraud.
Nasty...