I found an itinerary on Copa's site that works for me, but it says that the ticket is in basic econ. I would prefer to book a normal econ ticket, but can't find anywhere to make that change, nor to see the fare difference. Is this normal?

This must be for multi-city

Call them

Thank you for the tip as I encountered similar issue.

Additional data points for anyone encountering a similar issue. I booked the multi-city itinerary under Basic Economy fare family and also paid for advanced seat selection. I called in hoping to cancel the itinerary and rebook a new one but the additional payment paid for seat selection meant that I would not be eligible for the Flexible Cancellation (cancel within 24 hours of ticketing). Unsure if this is actually true of if the agent was trying to make his life easier. Fortunately, I was able to just pay the difference in fare between Economy Classic and Basic Economy but essentially ate the cost of the paid seat selection.

When managing booking after the tickets were reissued to select the seats, as the Economy Classic fare comes with free seat selection, I am still prompted to pay for advanced seat selection. I will likely call back in and see if I can select seats through the phone.

It's silly that Copa's website defaults to basic whenever you do multi-city.

One solution I found is to go on sites like Expedia and do the multi-city booking and select copa. On Expedia, they give you the option to upgrade to classic economy.


I honestly think this is a better solution then booking basic and calling back to speak with agent to upgrade to classic. On a couple of occasions, I had called Copa to book the multi-city booking on classic, and shockingly those specific agents were only to see basic economy fares. It seemed that they had no knowledge of how to look for classic fares for multi-city. I felt annoyed as I had waited on the call for some time only to get agents who could not do more than what I could do on my own on Copa's website.

Try Expedia and see how it goes.

Yep.

Yes, thanks for the help. It took a while on the phone (and I later found out that they made the reservation with first/last names switched), but it eventually worked. They initially offered the basic econ option, but also ask if you want to pay the surcharge for normal economy. I later used United plus points to upgrade my seats, which caused the reservation to get stuck in an error state, but this was fairly easy to fix on the phone. I guess this experience makes me appreciate United's service desk even more.