Originally Posted by daniellam

The "middle name" does make it to the CX/BA PNR! It will be found in the APIS/Secure flight field of the PNR when opened in Amadeus.

All airline reservations systems have the following fields:

1. Names field consisting of LASTNAME / FIRSTNAME

2. APIS/Secure flight field consisting of LAST / FIRST / MIDDLE

It is when airlines start to "dumb down" their system for their front end agents (and end customers booking online) by using GUIs then it becomes a problem.

In AA's GUI:

GUI LAST NAME = Names LASTNAME & APIS LAST
GUI FIRST NAME = Names FIRSTNAME & APIS FIRST
GUI MIDDLE NAME = APIS MIDDLE

For CX's GUI:

GUI LAST NAME = Names LASTNAME & APIS LAST
GUI GIVEN NAMES: Names FIRSTNAME & APIS FIRST

I suspect CX's motivation for their GUI design (and mapping to Amadeus) is to prevent Chinese first names that have two parts "SIU MING" from being split into two parts resulting in FIRSTNAME = SIU, MIDDLE NAME = MING when keyboard passport scanners are used to scan passports during the check-in process (the smarter agents would try to do a manual search in the passenger identification screen to find the passenger).

Machine readable line as scanned by CX check-in staff:
CHAN<<SIU<MING becomes the following in Amadeus

Names field: CHAN / SIU MING (SIU MING is shown in the "Names FIRSTNAME" field)
APIS Field: CHAN / SIU MING (SIU MING is shown in the "APIS FIRST" field)

Machine readable line as scanned by AA check-in staff:
CHAN<<SIU<MING becomes the following in Sabre

Names field: CHAN / SIU (The passport scanner interprets < as a separator between SIU and MING and only uses SIU as the first name for the "Names FIRSTNAME" field)
APIS Field: CHAN / SIU / MING (SIU is shown in the "APIS FIRST" field, while MING is shown in the "APIS MIDDLE" field)

Somehow I have a feeling that westerners like "SMITH/JOHN or BROWN/PETER" would not have a problem!! This is targeted towards people with with Chinese (two part) first names.