Puzzling codeshares
 

Just booked a few flights for the end of this month and came across a really strange situation:

While I was making the reservation, I had two flights show up as UA (UA4739 IAH-YUL and UA4748 YUL-EWR). I couldn't see the seat maps on either one of those flights. As soon as I booked it they changed to CO1282 and CO1288. I can now see the seat maps.

I called the CO Plat line and asked about how would upgrades be processed, and the lady told me that even though the plane and crew were UA, the boarding process was CO controlled now. I sent my itinerary to TripIt and it says "Aircraft Embraer 170 (Operated by Continental Airlines flight 1282)".

Is this new? CO1282 shows up when I check it out on flight status (although the upgrade standby list doesn't come up) but CO1288 simply doesn't exist yet.

Am I good to go in terms of upgrades? Will CO be the one processing EUA?

These are some of the CR7 flights that are operating as CO in an end-run on the CO ALPA scope clause. There are a few other threads about them but the short of it is that the EUA is handled by CO.

See also:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/unite...t=scope+clause
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/conti...t=scope+clause
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/unite...t=scope+clause
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/conti...t=scope+clause

Thanks, sbm12. That solves the mystery. Tried pulling the seatmaps on .bomb and it doesn't show up there so it seems everything is good. Strange that the e-ticket came with the UA flight numbers though.

Well here's something strange also. I flew a week ago to YYZ via IAH and booked on continental.com. I had several choices for this flight but picked the United express flight (it was coded as a UA flight and was a CRJ which had 6 first class seats. The CO flight leaving a little later was the usual ERJ which I have flown that has no first class. When I tried to select seats, it would not allow me to pick on the UA flight but when I checked a few hours later to check seat selection again it only showed up as a CO flight but showed the CRJ. configuration. I was upgraded at 48 hours (gold) and when I checked in online my boarding pass printed out with the UA flight number. When I arrived in IAH, the board only showed the CO flight number??

Same thing with the CR7s. They're quite confusing to the customer and don't really make much sense but apparently they're quite a useful way to add capacity on some routes so the company is keeping them.

To add even more fun to the whole thing, now my reservation shows the UA flight numbers (I can still see the seat maps though). Hopefully the certificate merge will come soon and take care of stuff like this. Imagine how confusing this is for the average Joe just trying to get from IAH to YUL...