Tow weeks ago, I showed up at CX in Jakarta 3 hours early for my flight to Hong Kong. I was on an AONE4, and wanted to change my flight booking on the same flight from CX776 to the AA codeshare. I had a paper (ugh) ticket. The woman at the CX ticket counter had stickers. She said I could not make this change less than 24 in advance of check in. She called CX Hong Kong, and they verified the same thing. She was willing to resticker, but said she couldn't. She was even willing to re-write the ticket (8 segments remaining) but said she wasn't allowed to rewrite the ticket if I hadn't changed the booking 24 hours prior to my flight. Very frustrating. If I had an e-ticket, I could have called and they would have made the change relatively insantaneously.

In LA, a week or two prior to this experience, I tried to do a similar thing: change from an AA codeshare on Qantas to the QF flight number (I was concerned about accumulating 4 QF segments, which I later solved by a short hop from Auckland to Christchurch). QF said they don't have and don't use stickers (they said if they had them, the request would have been no problem). The resulkt was the they would have had to re-write the entire ticket (19 segments remailing at that time), and there wasn't enough time to do that.

My conclusion: paper tickets stink. The rules surrounding these tickets are obscure, not well understood by the general agents, and interpreted differently around the world, and it's much preferable to call in an e-ticket exchange than to deal with randon paper ticket airport experiences and interpretations.