Greetings!

We recently booked a roundtrip with COPA SFO-MDE, connecting in PTY each way. On the day of our return, COPA offered two flights - one getting to SFO mid-afternoon and one arriving around midnight. We selected the earlier arrival.

Looking at our itinerary now, I see that COPA is no longer selling the earlier PTY-SFO flight - all fare classes have been zeroed out. In any experience with other airlines, this is an early warning that the flight is going to be cancelled. Calling COPA, the agent said the flight is still showing as active (not cancelled). When I asked her to try and price the itinerary, she agreed that no seats were available in her system but insisted that this is because the flight is sold out. Given that we are flying in February 2022, I am pretty certain this is not the case. All seats are also zeroed out on what was to be the turn-around flight SFO-PTY that day for our aircraft.

So, we're currently stuck. COPA is insisting the flight is active and won't proactively move us to the later flight (for seat selection, etc.) without charging us the fare difference. I don't like waiting in this situation for them to eventually cancel our flight and move us to the later flight (although I realize this is probably the best advice).

Has anyone else been in this situation before? Any advice for us given a knowledge about COPA or their scheduling changes? Does anyone know when the airline might eventually get around to cancelling the flight and rebooking us?

Thanks for any input!

Chris

Copa is pretty good about advising of any itinerary changes. Last time I had 3 months' notice that one of the flights in my trip was canceled and I got automatically booked onto one of the earlier flights.

Just keep an eye on your email and you should be good. Here is an example of the emails you would receive. https://ibb.co/vP269Hn

I'm on a similar Copa SFO-PTY flight, haven't received cancellation notice yet but I'm absolutely sure it will cancel.

Unlike the OP, I would be more interested in getting a refund rather than being rebooked on an alternate flight - I'm not very familiar with copa's policies, covid-19 or otherwise, would I be able to get a refund back to my credit card in this case if the rebooked alternate flight is unacceptable to me due to being a several hours difference? I am not interested in a voucher - only a cc refund, would it be possible?

Update:
45 days after they zeroed out the inventory and two months prior to takeoff, they finally notified us of the flight cancellation. They moved us onto the later flight PTY-SFO but kept us on our original (early) departure from MDE, leaving us with nearly 8 hours in Panama City.

The later MDE-PTY flight is fully open in business when trying to purchase the single leg (no seats even taken), but they have zeroed out the inventory if you want to route MDE-SFO for some reason. This flight would give us a valid, 45-minute connection and was available for sale just yesterday.

Calling this morning to try and make sense of this and get them to move us to the later flight. Not wanting to spend 8 hours in PTY.

Last update: no issues today with COPA's call center changing our routing to the later departure with shorter connection time in PTY. I expected issues but didn't encounter any, thankfully.

I'm glad you posted this. Came to the board for this specific issue-the outbound flight that we have booked no longer shows in flight searches, and our seats appear to be the only seats booked on the flight. Sounds like you had to wait for Copa to officially cancel. I would probably rather get a refund as I don't see any active flight options with a good alternative for us. I think we'll need to book another airline. Going to carve out time to call Copa to discuss. Major bummer. We are also traveling SFO-PTY-SJO and back. Our return flights are still looking good, I think. Looks like they are really shaking up their SFO routes. Pre-covid, there were excellent (for our need) departure times. The times showing for active flights right now out of SFO are really sucky and most require a stop now in LAX. Boo!