[Hdriver]

Copa is refusing to refund a ticket stating that it had expired before I requested the refund, however I do not believe this is the case. Can someone tell me how what they are doing isn't illegal? Here are the details:

• I purchased a fully refundable ticket in Miami in October 2011 for a flight leaving Santa Cruz, Bolivia to Panama on 1st Jan 2012.

• On the 29th Dec 2011 I changed the flight to leave 10th Nov 2012 and received email confirmation of the change.

• On the 7th Nov 2012 I called customer service to cancel the flight and obtain a refund and after several hours, several service reps and going to the office in Quito, Ecuador (I am currently travelling) I was told I couldn't get a refund as my ticket had expired.

After over a month of emailing (and waiting around a week for each reply) I am getting the same response 'Your ticket expired a year after purchase' which isn't true. The representative isn't addressing that my ticket should have been reissued on 29th December 2011 and should have been valid for refund.

As states on their terms and conditions: "If a ticket for a published fare that has not been used is completely re-issued, the new ticket will be valid for a year from the date on which the ticket was re-issued."

Simply put: If my ticket had expired a year from the original purchase then I would not have been able to take the flight. Thus the ticket must have been reissued and thus had not expired. The alternative is that he changed the flight date to a date after it would expire, which is impossible/fraud/illogical.

First they refused to answer why it wasn't reissued, and how it expired before the flight date, and now they are ignoring my emails and calling the customer service line just gets me "It's expired, send an email to customer service".

Can anyone explain how they can just take my money like this? I'm never dealing with COPA again, and will be telling everybody I meet to do the same.

(I won't go too far into how bad their customer service was, but of the four people I spoke to none of them could give me a straight answer, and all of them gave me different people I had to get in touch with, none of which worked, or told me to talk to other people, write emails or go to a office in Quito, which also couldn't help me, who told me to go to another office, which couldn't even address the problem. It took more calls just for them to tell me what the problem was, much less get to the point that they couldn't help me and to email customer service, which advises you of a 25 day!! return email time.)