[rsevenic]

After 3 months and one week, I received the $400 refund from CheapOair. It seems clear that this happened because I was persistent. When I needed missing information from US Airways, the complaint to the USDOT effectively pried that information loose after US Airways had become unresponsive. To get action from CheapOair, keeping an account of my travails on this social media site was crucial - sending links to CheapOair so that they were kept in the loop. This ultimately got my problem to the attention of an effective CheapOair representative, Kimberly Zapala. She solved the problem rather quickly, once involved. The financial end result was that changing to an earlier flight home via CheapOair was not any cheaper than just getting another flight through another booking agency i.e. pleading a medical emergency merely pared down CheapOair's exorbitant fee to a normal level. I'll not use CheapOair again


I had one prior interaction with an online airline booking agency where I pursued a refund when the death of an immediate family member required a flight cancellation. The airline was Delta and the booking agency was, as I recall, Expedia. The refund in that case went smoothly and with reasonable dispatch. I suspect that some good luck was involved.