[NateEag]

I wonder if airlines are no worse than any other organization at dealing with human names, but they're exposed to many more edge cases than the average company, since they're in the business of enabling rapid travel between continents.

[Muromec]

I think that's the case. Any other organization is bound to some kind of context with it's own set of arbitrary choices and restrictions, but only restrictions in GDS are "two names both at least one (or two?) letter each, spelled with Latin alphabet, non-case sensitive". Funnily enough, the set of restrictions used by Visa/Mastercard one step later in the process is subtly different.

[throwaway14356]

i don't see how it needs to be any different from pen and paper.