The Madness of Flight

Our needs were simple enough. Our trip was a split, dual destination affair. We wanted to fly from London to Cancun. And then home from Mexico City to London. Our dates were specific. But the prices were extortionate. So I simplified our search to direct returns between London and either Cancun or Mexico City. Still very expensive. In the end, we settled for cheapish flights between London and Cancun with a stop and change of planes in Mexico City.

It’s insane. We would have preferred to just have had the LHR to MEX leg. But we made our tickets hundreds of pounds cheaper by adding on an extra flight, from MEX to CUN. So we did that. We booked direct with Aeromexico, who claim that environment responsibility is a pillar of their foundation. I’m going to suggest that a pricing strategy that encourages unnecessary flights is not compatible with that pledge. And I think airlines that do that should be forced to sport a label on their website to let folk know that they’re evil and deliberately killing the planet. Not a yellow star, obviously. Something less controversial. Perhaps a Russian flag would do.

Then we needed to book our internal flights to get to Mexico City and back. We would return from MEX to CUN with Volaris, early on a Saturday morning, in very good time to catch our flight back to MEX (and then on to London) five hours later. A week before the flight, Volaris emailed to say that the flight had been ‘delayed’, and would depart MEX three and a half hours later than planned. I’m not sure that this is really a ‘delay’. Not when it happens this much in advance. It’s a change. Isn’t it? I’m not mad, am I? It’s definitely a change, not a delay.

I explained to Volaris that the ‘change’ meant we’d not be in time for our evening flight and asked them to put us on an earlier flight. No problem, they said. But the fee for changing a flight was five times the price of buying new flights. I asked them to refund the money instead. No, señor! The delay was not significant. The delay has to be four hours to be considered significant. It turns out that every airline has their own idea of what is or isn’t significant. And these interpretations of significant can vary widely. I think this should be looked at, and an industry standard adopted worldwide. An hour seems reasonable to me. Anyway, that was our first and last booking with Volaris. We arranged new flights with Aeromexico.

Things happen in 3s, don’t they. Of course they do. The day before we returned to London, I tried to engage with a human at Aeromexico on Twitter. I hoped for a sensible, human-like response. I expected little. And I wasn’t disappointed. “Listen guys. Tomorrow I am going to catch an Aeromexico flight from Mexico City to Cancun for the sole purpose of catching an Aeromexico flight straight back to Mexico City a few hours later, which is the first leg of our trip back to London. I don’t need any refunds, but how about me and the wife skip those first two completely pointless flights and just catch the MEX to LHR later on?”

In all normal circumstances, if you miss a leg of a flight, the rest of the itinerary is cancelled. But, you know….I’m sure there’s a way to fix that? A manual override? But I got exactly the response I expected. So Mrs P and I flew to Cancun. We waited four hours. Then a fifth, because our next flight was late to the gate. It arrived. We all boarded. We waited. And waited. Then the flight was cancelled. We all got off. A night in a hotel was arranged. At midnight, I wearily got into bed. But not before a quick bit of Twitter. “Hello Aeromexico. Me again. Guess what…?!”

We tried again the next day, and eventually completed our marathon journey. We walked through the front door of home a grand total of 49 hours and 54 minutes after leaving our CDMX AirBnb. Commercial air travel is a wondrous thing, but there is room for improvement in the implementation of ticketing and customer service. But do you know what really blows my mind? Nearly 110 years after the first commercial flight took off from in Florida, we still don’t really know what keeps a plane in the air.

* I took the photograph at the top as we passed over the now abandoned New Mexico City airport at Texcoco, a few miles out from Benito Juarez airport.