I'm on a multi-city trip that was originally booked as all UA, but had to be changed to include a new set of legs mid-trip. The new legs involved two CO flights (CO flight numbers/CO metal - YQB->EWR->MCO), which will be my first experience on CO. I fly these legs at 6am tomorrow morning.

The trouble started when I tried to select seats. The UA site would let me select them, but when I left the seat selection page, I got a "Unable to assign seats" error. When I went to the CO site, I failed similarly. Also, I wasn't offered any elite seating (exit row, etc). This made me think that there was a problem with the reservation, so I called the 1K desk, who in turn called CO ... I got seats and was told that my 1K number was in properly on both the UA and CO sides.

As far as I can tell, as a UA 1K, I should be eligible for upgrades at 120 hrs out. Unfortunately, my name never showed up on the CO upgrade wait lists. The site clearly says though that you only get on the list once you check in, so I dutifully waited until 6am this morning to check in.

Well, 6am comes and I try to check in, and the CO site tells me there's no eTicket associated with the PNR. So it's back to talking to the 1K desk. I'm told "Oh, it all looks just fine from here, but we did have to re-issue the ticket, so try to check in with this new ticket number". I did as suggested, but got the same result (Huh? No eticket is associated with this eticket number?!?!).

So I call again to ask the 1K desk to transfer me over to CO to see if we can fix this. They do the transfer, and the nice woman at CO says "Oh! You're upgraded on the UA last leg of this ticket, which puts the reservation 'out of sync'. That's why you can't check in or get upgraded." I ask how to resolve the issue and she says "well, you really can't ... you'll just have to check in at the airport tomorrow and hope everything goes well". I politely asked her to check with her support desk to see if there's any workaround, which she did, but with no improvement in the outcome. The only suggestion they had was they could put me back in coach on the UA flight, and then there was a chance that I could check in. I opted against...

So, I now come to this crowd. Is there something here I'm missing?