I'm switching to Star Alliance and trying to pick a program (although at the moment CO is leading the pack.)

One thing I have noticed is I can't book CO tickets out of EAU as the new EAU-ORD flights do not have CO codeshares. The EAU-ORD service is new as of March 1, 2010 - so is a CO codeshare on this route something I can expect to happen in the future? As it stands, it is prohibitively expensive to ticket EAU-ORD-CO Metal since I'd have to pay United's $269 EAU-ORD round trip fare for EAU-ORD hops. That would be a pretty strong incentive to stick to UA metal, which then becomes a strong incentive to start out with Mileage Plus (although I am currently annoyed that I would not be able to get a status match to UA until Feb, I shouldn't have any trouble maintaining 50k EQM on United and would thus beat my CO Plat status for upgrades.)

I could just stick with flying out of MSP, but if I'm going to do that anyway, it may (ugh) make sense to just stick with DL (ugh again) where I'm currently Plat. It seems DL is the cheaper alternative except for US, and well, then I'd have to fly US.