I'm posting this to TravelBuzz even though our experience was on AA because I believe this is a generic story. To those of you who will read ths and say, "Well, you shoulda known"- I know now! To the rest of you, a word to the wise.

We're flying on an AA ticket to Zurich on a Swiss codeshare. First mistake- they asked for a paper ticket and we didn't have one. Now they could have sent tickets in the mail and I could have thrown them out thinking it was AA promotional material- I wasn't expecting paper tickets. Gate agents told me to expect paper tickets for codeshares and to call if they don't arrive. At any rate, it took the gate agent 40 minutes (with assistance from a colleague who stayed past quitting time to help) to generate tickets- essentially it was treated as a Lost Ticket Application. She was nice enough to straighten out our Swiss seat assignments while she was at it; they'd put my husband and me a few rows apart after I'd called and requested adjoining seats months ago.

Finally relaxed in MCI's Admirals Club, got to ORD. Made the grevious error of heading straight to Terminal 5 thinking there would be an Admiral's Club to wait out the 4 hours to go till our flight to ZRH. No Admiral's Club. Swissair Club not open for hours. Tried to get back to domestic terminal thinking we could go to the Admiral's Club. No dice. Security drones wouldn't let us back in and told us to go to AA ticket counter. AAgent called Admiral's Club and said we couldn't get in on my Platinum card because we were flying Coach on a codeshare, not AA metal. How we got in at MCI I don't know. He was nice enought to find out that DL's Crown Room would take PriorityPass and issue us a pass to get through Security.

Wow. I knew that you didn't collect AAdvantage miles if you flew a BA codeshare to London- avoided that trap, at least. But there were a few new ones on this trip. Fortunately, the flight home is via AA out of LHR.