Upvote:3
Did anybody have any advice on how to get at least a partial refund?
Squeaky wheel gets the grease. I think your only chance is to keep calling and threaten to initiate a charge back on your credit card. Eventually you may find an agent who will actually process your refund. Whether that's worth the significant investment in time, effort and aggravation is yours to decide.
paid over $113 for the flexible ticket optioe
Flex tickets are rarely worth it. Typically the only difference to a regular ticket is that they waive the change fee, but paying $100 more to save a $50 change fee really makes no sense. You also need to carefully read the terms and conditions of what "flex" actually means for your specific ticket.
I had a terrible accident the day before
I'm sorry that this happened to you and I hope you have recovered. However this type of risk typically covered through travel insurance, not through the airline or booking agent. In this case both have the right to treat this as "not our problem".
I will never take a risk and deal with them again
Lesson learned. Unless you have a really strong reason it's always the best option to book directly with the airline. If anything goes wrong the airlines says "the booking agent needs to handle this" and the booking agent says "the airline needs to handle this". This is typically spelled out in the terms and conditions of both which you did agree when you booked it. This means that you agreed to basically have no customer service and no accountability.