Originally Posted by
StefanNYC
Indeed, it has been my feeling that there must be some formal policy in effect <...> making things like <...> "Alexander" and "Alexandre", etc. officially equivalent
... and, as I just recalled, they are in fact equivalent for the delta.com engine (!). A search for a friend's itinerary using "Alexander" as the first name succeeds despite his actual name on the itinerary being spelled "Aleksandr" (which is a direct transliteration from Cyrillic). At the same time, entering "John" fails -- so it's not like first name is ignored altogether.
If the computer believes they are the same, so should an agent, one would think.