What the heck. It is plain torture.
Q: How do I enter a town name like 4658 Däniken SO?
A: Daniken SO, plus in the province field also SO. Anything else will be reject as a invalid address/town.
Please be aware that they also check the street name against a database too! Not sure, but I think they use the database from Swiss Post: https://www.post.ch/en/pages/plz-suche
It might help to use the full anglicised spelling: Daeniken and expand SO to Solothurn. It's frustrating, but just be glad you're not one of the nationalities that have 4 first names and 4 family names.
Sorry for this late reply: "Daeniken" does not work, neither does "Daniken Solothurn". As said in the inital post it must be "Daniken SO"
Use an ASCII key create the umlauts etc. For eg. ALT 156 gives the £ sign.
My understanding here is always that you should just remove the Umlauts. ä to ae, ö to oe and ü to ue are in use for German regions only.
Normally I leave the spelling the same and just remove the umlauts & accents.
But when we applied for the Australian equivalent to the esta, I read the instructions they provided on accents, it said to enter your name as it is in the scannable bottom section of your passport page. Which for my husband had ae instead of ä.
I think you do not get it. For sure I can type umlaut characters and many others as well (ALT + 0245 gives you õ), that is not the problem.
The problem is what the ESTA application website considers as the one and only correct address. If it does not match that, you can not proceed with the application.
In my experience ESTA is a bit inconsistent on these things so it may be down to trial and error.
This was the accepted way of doing it. It was much more common and well known, when I came here 30 years ago as most systems did support foreign characters.
In fact in the computer readable strip on the passport that is how the name is transcribed, so if you ignore that and just leave off the diactric, you may end up with an inconsistent name. Which is also something the ESTA people don't like either.
The first thing any immigration official is going to do is to scan that band and the system will look for matches, including with ESTA. Many passports now have a chip but that is still relatively slower (1 or 2 seconds) than the scan ban.
Not in the US or even in Australia but in Gatwick airport, where you might have expected them to know better, the OH had a stand off with a jobsworth of a check-in clerk who claimed the name on her passport did not match that on her ticket.
She had actually followed instructions and left the umlaut off her name, which meant that it was different from that in her passport where it was transcribed with oe. We very almost missed the flight because of it.
Since then she has ignored instructions and always used oe and never had any trouble.
So I think the moral here is to ignore those who say to just ignore umlauts and stick to the spelling as seen on your passport or ID.
My address has no umlauts but also not found by the ESTA system. I believe if you try and fail enough times it gives you the option to declare that the address given is correct i.e. you can get an ESTA without a recognised address.
Thank you aSITUS. You just saved me myself some headache.