Originally Posted by
corporate-wage-slave
Spare a thought for the many people in Kent and East Anglia who have the historic Flemish name of De'Ath.
The problem here is that airlines can't do hyphens, apostrophes and certain characters such as ð, which is in the name of approx 5% of Icelandic citizens. Plus the majority of the planet that doesn't use the Latin script at all. Unfortunately the DHS computers (and their Canadian equivalents) can handle these letters, so mismatches are inevitable. But it does clearly illustrate why it is an urban myth that your ticket needs to match your passport name - in many cases that is simply impossible.
Best advice? Keep it short, drop middle names and matronymics, just one first name and one family name will do. So long as it clearly identifies you and isn't a million miles off your passport name, that should suffice.
I do not recommend dropping the middle name on a booking if you passport has it in - I had great fun in the US one summer, because the person booking a series of flights did not include my middle name, and yet it was on my passport. My last name is also hyphenated, but that has never caused issues, it just drops the hyphen and smushes the two words together (and cuts off the end of the name because there are too many characters!)