Had a horrible experience yesterday at SFO yesterday. I was on UA issued CO metal early morning flights from SFO-IAH-XXX. CO canceled my fights and failed to notify me. I went to the airport and was protected on (12+ hours later on a redeye flight. I had a connecting flight (on a separate CO ticket, CO metal) from XXX to EU which I would have missed if I had taken it. Because of the misconnection (XXX), I requested to be put on SFO-XXX direct flight. Was told no go and only option was going through EWR. I held up the travel advisory (on CO's website yesterday for EWR and IAH) to their face and said I am not going to miss out on being in Europe. Their response: "Oh...trust me. You will be fine". CO playing GOD didn't convince me so I tried getting UA involved. Some stupid RCC staff said CO is responsible in reissuing the ticket. This was also parroted by 1K agents. After some calling, a CO res. agent put me on a (next day) UA flight to FRA. No hotel or food vouchers because CO does not do this for WX. UA RCC said the same.

This morning, I find out that I could have avoided ALL this by going to the UA 1K ticket counter and asking them to take control of the ticket. 1K supervisor confirmed that during IRROP situations, they can take any *A ticket. This means CO does NOT need to open/endorse/issue anything. You can totally bypass this airline. Instead of 6 hours, this could have been done in a few mins. And the best part would have been to avoid the totally CO agents in SFO, including the supervisor who wants to play god and takes herself to know better than the travel advisory offered by her company. Absolutely dislike CO travel counter in SFO . Hope I won't have to go that again!

I am also upset with being misled by SFO RCC agents...infact a good bunch of them who sang in unison that CO must reissue the ticket. So part of my frustration also goes to the crappy and incompetent SFO UA staff.