Vrot Mango
("Vrot" is a South African word meaning "rotten")
Since I earned a nice holiday, I had the doubtful privilege of having to buy an airline ticket to Cape Town. That is not something that one would normally write about on a weblog, but my experience with Mango unexpectedly became relevant to the topics of this blog. Read more to see the story unfold.
When it comes to buying airline tickets, the price is probably one of the most important considerations. I am (at least at this stage) not yet loyal to any airline. Therefore I compared a few prices and after postponing things for too long, Mango had the best price (Kulula was still a bit cheaper earlier in the week). On towards booking the ticket - here is where the frustration started.
With Mango, several modes of payment is possible - among them by debit card. For this, however, Internet Explorer is needed. Credit card payment seems possible with Firefox. At the fields for name and surname, it specifically specifies that it must be entered as appears on the credit card. 
In my case my first name is only indicated as "F". This is however not allowed by the site, and I get a red error message "No special characters allowed in the text box" (note the bad layout in Firefox to boot). Now this is interesting for me. Of course "F" is no special character, and the issue seems to be that single letters are not allowed in the first name field. I can't think why the name and surname must be specified separately. As a single field it would have already solved a few internationalisation problems (it is the way it appears on the card anyway).
But of greater interest is the way in which it seems that only ASCII characters are allowed. Now what should I do if my name happened to be "Riët"? Should I just pretend that my name is "Riet"? ("Riët" is a reasonably common Afrikaans female name, whereas "Riet" is the Afrikaans word for "reed".) I am under no illusion that many (perhaps most) service providers in South Africa provides no support outside of ASCII. Part of my residential address contains the character "é" and I have seen problems with this (apart from the fact that nobody can/want to type it).
Apart from the ethical dilemma of either lying about what is written on my card, or to try and manoeuvre around the whole issue, my session expired while I was reading the terms and conditions. At that point they lost my clientèle, and I went to another airline (where the price happened to have fallen back to below Mango's price). At a next opportunity I will write about my experience in terms of localisation at the airline where I ended up spending my Rands (South African currency).
Comments
Apparently it is not just me thinking this way
It was interesting when I just found this.
http://jonstwist.wordpress.com/2006/11/01/vrot-mango-rotten-mango/
It makes you think...
payment systems are developed for the western/north world
If you go into payment processees and systems, it is not only the use of characters, but also other elelemnts that made us develop UMVA.
The big systems we are using in banking today are developed in the 70's they have been renewed on the front-end when the internet arrived but most systems are still old in the core. All large systems surrounding that, insurance, health, airliners (as one of the first to be automated) have the same problem. We have had some smaller corrections during the millenium change but even the new developed Internet banking or Phone payment systems are connected to the ID of a bankaccount. The Americans had their push back due to 9-11 since that day the KYC (know your customer) rules are pushed to US standards and the whole world has to work according to these rules. So we have rules how to put in the name, adress, date of birth etc. The fact that in the US first name means given name and not the name that comes first gives me problems in whole of Africa. In Africa not every house has a house nr. or ZIP code, many systems brake since these are obligatory fields. Banks cannot change, it would be too expensive, and the hide behind the rules they make themselves like BaselII.
We are introducing our system in Africa, to start in Rwanda, and i do not have a lot of time to explain this history, so we identify different, we work with icons and pictures and our developers with roots in the opensource have a "more intenational" view on international characters then the US.
We just adopted Pootle to help is with the tanslation side and i hope to get Pootle in different languages quickly, starting with Kinyarwanda.
For any-one who wants to have a look at our system visit oour website www.umva.org
Address standards for South Africa
Hi Cornelis.
You might be interested to know that we actually have people working on address standards in South Africa: http://www.cs.up.ac.za/cs/scoetzee/sans1883/ - and they realise things aren't quite as simple as you might think.
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