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March 17, 2007
When is a flight to Mexico City not a flight to Mexico City?
When it's a flight to Chihuahua!
Shawn and I arrived at the Guadalajara airport an hour and a half early for our flight to Mexico City. Shawn has a three-day weekend because of the birthday of Benito Juárez, so we thought we'd take a fun weekend trip to the capital. We booked our flight on Aero California and our stay at the Sheraton María Ísabel. We arranged the day before for a cab to take us to the airport. We packed the night before. We shut off the gas. We washed all the dishes in the sink and did a last run through the refrigerator to make sure we left nothing that would spoil over the three days we would be gone. It was one of those rare occasions where we did everything just right. We even arrived in plenty of time at the airport; like I said, we got there an hour and a half early.
But instead of writing this entry seated at the desk at the Sheraton looking out the window at the Angel of Independence, I'm at my dining room table at Casa Cubilete, looking at a down-in-the-dumps Shawn. Even though we we got there in plenty of time, and were waiting right at the gate when our flight left, we never knew it was our flight because they repeatedly announced it only as a flight going to Chihuahua.
To be precise, the flight was listed twice, with one destination being Chihuahua and the other being Mexico (what they call Mexico City here). On the departures board, they looked like this (I'm translating it to English for you):
Maybe it's just me, but when I'm looking at something like that, the way that I find the thing I'm looking for, the thing I isolate first, is the destination city. Looking through the airline abbreviations or the flight numbers is more work for me mentally than locating the city first, then drilling down to the airline and flight number. Therefore, when I looked at the board as shown above, I saw the line for "MEXICO" but didn't notice that the line for "CHIHUAHUA" was the same flight number, departing at the same time, at the same gate. Once I had found the three lines that had "MEXICO" in them, I didn't bother looking at any of the other lines. Why would I? I wasn't going to any of those other places.
When they announced the flight, they announced it with the destination of Chihuahua. Not once did they say "Chihuahua, stopping in Mexico" or anything like that. It was always announced as going to Chihuahua and only Chihuahua. It seemed funny to me that they kept announcing that departure, seemingly more than the others, and at one point, an Aero California representative came over to us and asked us if we were going to Chihuahua. We both said, "No." I added, although I guess he didn't hear me, "no, a Mexico." Supposedly, as they told us later, they walked around calling our names to locate us. However, we've noticed that in the US, when this is done, they use a public address system, or at least someone shouts it out. In Mexico, when someone addresses a crowd, they often do it in such a soft voice that only the people in the front of the line can hear and the people in the back might not even know they're being addressed. That was the case with us. We didn't even know they were looking for anyone, let alone that they were walking around trying to locate us.
Once the flight for Chihuahua left, we figured we were about to board, since we were the next flight out of Gate 14. But when time went by and they didn't start announcing our flight, we went to look at the board. It said that our flight was "CLOSED." We looked to find someone working for Aero California and finally came across the guy that asked us if we were going to Chihuahua. As soon as I showed him our ticket and started out saying (in Spanish), "We're going to Mexico but it says the flight is closed..." He said (in flawless English), "Oh, that flight left! I asked you if you were going to Mexico or Chihuahua and you said no!" Whether or not he truly believed he had asked us this way or if he knew he was lying, I don't know. But he didn't ask us if we were going to Mexico or Chihuaha. He asked us if we were going to Chihuahua. Period. We were not. We said, accurately, "no."
We got our luggage back, and after a lot of hassle talking to a manager, they put us on another flight. To their credit, they didn't charge us any additional fees. They kept maintaining that their representative asked us if we were going to Mexico or Chihuahua when he came over, but my Spanish isn't as bad as all that. The bummer is that we've now missed one night of our vacation in Mexico City, and since our hotel was prepaid, we lost USD $150 on a room we're not sleeping in tonight. It also involved another MXN $200 to get back from the airport, then another MXN $200 to take us back to the airport tomorrow at 6:30 am.
The moral of this story is, know the final destination of your flights and bus routes. This is common with bus routes, I realized later. You may buy a ticket on a bus line that goes through seven different cities and stops at the bus terminal in each one. The tickets and the boards don't necessarily list all the stops on the trip, and often at the gates, you have to identify the bus by its final destination, as it won't list an on-the-way stop in the banner above the driver's head. Usually, they list only the final stop, or on occasion the most major stop on the route. I just didn't think about that happening with airline tickets because when I bought them, I entered in the destination of Mexico City in the search. Not once when I bought the tickets did it talk about the flight being the flight to Chihuahua that stops in Mexico City, nor does it say anything about Chihuahua on any of the receipts, confirmations and itineraries. Yet it worked for our needs because it goes from Guadalajara to Mexico City. We just didn't have any idea that Mexico was just a brief stop on its way to Chihuahua.
Shawn, having so little free time feels like this has really soured the whole weekend. Hopefully we'll still have enough fun to make it worth going, even if we get there a day late. Hopefully nothing will go wrong tomorrow.
Posted by crispy at March 17, 2007 01:41 AM
Comments
I know how Shawn is feeling! Tell him we'll make it up to him in Texass!
Posted by: carolco at March 17, 2007 08:33 AM
Sweet mother of gravy!
Several things strike me here, not the least of which that this sucks ass!
Wasn't your luggage on the plane? How did you get it back?
You're getting quite brave (or doped up) to fly so casually. You have regained your freedom!
I love my Chihuahua! At almost 13, he's dropped from 5 1/2 pounds to like 4 3/4, and has gained the nickname Shakey Greyhame, and lost his squishiness, but he's still savory!
Posted by: Mark Allen at March 17, 2007 11:59 AM
We were traveling through Europe on trains. We had a connecting train from Berlin to Amsterdam in a little tiny town halfway between. we get off our Berlin train at the right station at 1am, but wait - where's our connection information on the boards? In fact, NO train is to be heading to Amsterdam, so WTF? Eventually, the train assistant manager of 1am travel calls in and wakes someone somewhere, and finds that if we go wait on track 14 at 2:34am, a train will stop for 1 minute. It only stops if there are passengers waiting. There are no explanations or information about this mystery train or mystery stop. After an hour of eerie stillness, at 2:32am, an unmarked train pulls in, stops, then immediately departs on our platform, without actually stopping for anyone or anything. We get very worried. Ten minutes later, after some agony whether we should go alert someone, another train comes in (this time with our actual train number on it - the one not marked on the incoming train list), stops long enough for us to get on and pulls out again - exactly one minute. The train is not marked for Amsterdam, but the conductor says we should be okay, as long as we jump off at Centraal Station there at 6am. He said unmarked stoppings are normal.
Moral - don't trust signs, people, schedules, or Ambien.
ps - also, never fly on christmas - took me 16 hours via US Airways to get from LA to Vegas to Dallas this last year. could have almost driven faster with less stress.
[crispy says: Yeah, that's ridiculous. Of course, I wouldn't expect flying on Christmas to be a pleasant experience. As for your train stuff, that's just wacky. I don't know if I could handle that. I mean, how do you know? You rely on the fact that some person will be where you stop that happens to know and will be willing to tell you what to do? I don't trust people enough for that.]
Posted by: brett at March 17, 2007 02:00 PM
That sucks, the last time I flew through Seattle/Tacoma, they marked the luggage by destination city at baggage check, but my bag was nowhere to be seen. On top of that, the line to customer service was a mile long at 1:34 am.
Posted by: Jon at March 19, 2007 04:59 PM
Mark Allen writes: "Wasn't your luggage on the plane? How did you get it back?"
The answer to that is no. They put it on the plane, but then when we didn't show up at the gate and board the plane, they pulled it off again. I suspect that's an anti-terrorist tactic.
Posted by: Chris Coen at March 25, 2007 02:19 AM