You may notice the next time you book a flight that we now ask you to provide both the gender (male or female) and a date of birth for all passengers.  Some of you want to know why we are suddenly asking for that — we’ve never asked for it before.

It’s a good question.  The truth is, we’re not happy about it either.  But a new government mandate from the Transportation Security Administration is not leaving us– or anyone else who sells airline tickets– a choice.  The new SecureFlight program now requires that all airlines collect this information from all passengers, whether those passengers book their ticket through the airline directly or through a third party partner like us.

According to the TSA, the information will be used only to attempt to match passenger lists with terrorist watch lists in order to identify suspected terrorists who are trying to fly.  The program will also, according to the TSA, reduce the number of non-terrorists who are incorrectly flagged because they have the same name as someone being watched.

There are some airlines who are now requiring this information at time of ticket purchase.  For these airlines, we will ask that you provide the date of birth(s) right away, as you’re filling out our purchase form.  Other airlines are accepting reservations without it, but are requiring that it be added at least 3 days prior to departure.  For those airlines, you can leave the date of birth blank when you book your flight; you’ll just have to contact us later with the information.  We’ve made it easy for you to do this — you can either call our Customer Service Center at 1-800-CHEAP-AIR, e-mail us at Help@CheapAir.com (be sure to include your booking number!), or add the information on-line by going to the My Trips page on our site and following the simple instructions.