Over the past few months, I've been on four mixed UA/CO trips. Whenever the first segment is on CO, I always get this message when trying to check in online:


We are unable to complete the check-in process as a valid eTicket coupon cannot be found. Please contact a Continental Representative at 1-800-300-1547 for assistance.


I call CO and they can't explain why this is so. Today, the agent said that because I'm upgraded from SFO-LAS (a UA flight), this is why I cannot check in the HNL-SFO flight (a CO flight).

Huh?

This happens to me every time I have a CO flight (either upgraded or not, but usually when its upgraded) on a UA reservation. I can't check in and no one can tell me why. Well, the good news is that you're upgrades are still confirmed. You just have to see a gate agent at the airport to obtain your boarding pass. Its usually pretty hassle-free. Since you're upgraded, definitly visit the first class or business class gate agents since you don't want to have to wait in line.

Note: you can't check in using the kiosks at the airport either, that won't work, you'll get an error message. It has to be a human.

I think this is a temporary problem.

OP: I believe there is a thread in the consolidated forum on this issue.

From my understanding, the reason behind the issue is that your ticket is out of sync. When you get an upgrade on a UA flight, UA does not reissue the ticket to reflect the new class of service. On the other hand, CO will reissue a ticket when there has been an upgrade. Currently, this problem will persist till we are under one reservation system.

temporary issue, annoying issue. I had one where only 1 of the two tickets printed out (when I got tix at airport) and attendant "couldn't find" the other portion of the flight...VERY annoying

This may be true but I had another itin last month where CO was my first flight and UA on the second and third legs. I was waitlisted for upgrades on the UA flights so wanted to check in earlier so I had the edge if it came to a "tie breaker."

I still couldn't check in on line and had to wait until I got to the airport.

Seems that any upgrade (pending or confirmed) on a mixed itinerary will cause the issue. Most likely since CO's reservation system see the itinerary as having changes made to it that have not be corrected.

Same thing just happened to me. Have a mixed itin - CO is the first segment, UA on the second, was upgraded - and can't check in. CO agent told me specifically it was because of the UA upgrade clearing, and specifically said because of this, my ticket was not "in sync" on the CO side. Said I would just have to check in at the airport.

This means I can't get on the CO EUA list for my first flight - not that I'm even gonna come close on a EWR-ORD flight as a silver, but still....

When this happened to me once, I called UA and they told me that sometimes, for security reasons, they require frequent flyers to be seen by a human - every once in a while. I don't know if that's true, but it was interesting.

From a newly "SHARES trained" UA agent's point of view it seems SHARES has MAJOR issues with e-ticket synchronization. Almost ANY change to an itinerary will cause an out of sync condition. A warning flag appears at the top of a SHARES PNR when a potential out of sync condition exists so I'm at loss as why a CO phone agent couldn't fix the problem and allow OLCI.

"You know the best part of checking in on-line? No lines!"

If I had a dime for every time I heard that.

I had a similar situation recently. My flights were HPN-ORD on UA, and ORD-SFO on CO.

Because the ORD-SFO (on CO) had cleared for an upgrade, this segment no longer appeared on my full itinerary. This single CO segment only appeared on the CO website. A UA rez agent said that they had to remove the CO segment from the full itinerary because if they kept the CO segment there, then the CO system would see me as "double-booked" on the CO flight. Well, this was the explanation I was given.

Online check-in would only give me the UA HPN-ORD segment. I could not get the boarding pass printed for the CO ORD-SFO segment on either the UA or CO websites. Argh.

The UA folks at HPN tried and tried but had no luck either. As CO does not serve HPN, I could not run over to the CO counter to have my bp printed. So upon landing at ORD, I had to run to a CO counter to get my bp. I did not want to risk being a no-show for the CO flight and/or lose my upgrade.

I will stick to an all UA flight next time!

When I had a mixed UA/CO set of flights recently, there were separate PNRs for the UA and CO segments. I could check into CO with the CO PNR and United with the United PNR.

You always have a seperate PNR for each airline in your itin.

I tried checking in on the apps and websites. No go. UA app/site told me to check in with CO. CO told me I had to go to the airport to check in. Even after check in, I went to one of the dual-kiosk things in EWR to try and change my seat on the second flight, and it told me that my eticket didn't exist, or something like that. Though it must have - I was able to board both flights ok.

This appears to be a limitation of shares - hopefully it gets better when UA is full continentialized and operating under the older more backward system.

It's been long enough since I worked in an agency that I'd actually forgotten that. (I wasn't a TA, though)