Let`s have a example hotels table:

CREATE TABLE `hotels` (
  `HotelNo` varchar(4) character set latin1 NOT NULL default '0000',
  `Hotel` varchar(80) character set latin1 NOT NULL default '',
  `City` varchar(100) character set latin1 default NULL,
  `CityFR` varchar(100) character set latin1 default NULL,
  `Region` varchar(50) character set latin1 default NULL,
  `RegionFR` varchar(100) character set latin1 default NULL,
  `Country` varchar(50) character set latin1 default NULL,
  `CountryFR` varchar(50) character set latin1 default NULL,
  `HotelText` text character set latin1,
  `HotelTextFR` text character set latin1,
  `tagsforsearch` text character set latin1,
  `tagsforsearchFR` text character set latin1,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`HotelNo`),
  FULLTEXT KEY `fulltextHotelSearch` (`HotelNo`,`Hotel`,`City`,`CityFR`,`Region`,`RegionFR`,`Country`,`CountryFR`,`HotelText`,`HotelTextFR`,`tagsforsearch`,`tagsforsearchFR`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 COLLATE=latin1_german1_ci;

In this table for example we have only one hotel with Region name = "Graubünden" (please note umlaut ü character)

And now I want to achieve same search match for phrases: 'graubunden' and 'graubünden'

This is simple with use of MySql built in collations in regular searches as follows:

SELECT *  
FROM `hotels` 
WHERE `Region` LIKE CONVERT(_utf8 '%graubunden%' USING latin1) 
COLLATE latin1_german1_ci

This works fine for 'graubunden' and 'graubünden' and as a result I receive proper result, but problem is when we make MySQL full text search

Whats wrong with this SQL statement?:

SELECT 
 *
FROM 
 hotels 
WHERE 
 MATCH (`HotelNo`,`Hotel`,`Address`,`City`,`CityFR`,`Region`,`RegionFR`,`Country`,`CountryFR`, `HotelText`, `HotelTextFR`, `tagsforsearch`, `tagsforsearchFR`)
AGAINST( CONVERT('+graubunden' USING latin1)  COLLATE latin1_german1_ci IN BOOLEAN MODE)            
ORDER BY Country ASC, Region ASC, City ASC

This doesn`t return any result. Any ideas where the dog is buried ?