[fuzzy]

I am surprised there are not more complaints about this airline, but maybe that is because not many Americans fly with them?? My husband and I had the trip from hell last month on Mexicana.

On the trip to Cancun from San Antonio, it wasn't too bad, except they only spoke Spanish and gave us the immigration forms in Spanish (said they did not have them in English). I speak/read a little Spanish - enough to get by, but my husband does not and he had a hard time, so I translated for him as best I could. But otherwise everything was OK and we made it to Cancun and had a wonderful vacation. However, when the time came to fly home, that all changed...

We arrived at the Mexicana ticket counter in Cancun 3 hours before our scheduled departure because that is when the airport transfer scheduled to drop us off. We checked in with no problems. The ticket agent gave us our boarding passes and basically didn't say a word to us. We went through security, found our gate, and sat down for a few drinks at a bar nearby. About an hour into that, we were trying to decide if we should eat an early lunch in Cancun before we left, or wait till we got to our connection in Mexico City. I pulled out the boarding passes to see how much layover time we would have there. I was looking at the times when I noticed something odd. It didn't immediately jump out at me because it was in European/military time (24 hr instead of 12 hr) that I am not as used to seeing. I handed my husband the passes and asked him if something seemed not right. Is Mexico City in a different time zone? we wondered. What it boiled down to is our connecting flight from Mexico City back to San Antonio departed 2 hours before our arrival in Mexico City!! We were both dumbfounded that an airline would issue boarding passes for a flight that we clearly had no chance of making.

My husband sought out a gate agent and fortunately found someone who spoke English. This person confirmed that indeed, there was a disconnect. Our connecting flight had previously been scheduled at a later time that we would have made, but some reason the airline decided to push it EARLIER by 3 hours (never heard of such a thing). We should have been put on an earlier flight into Mexico City so that we could have made the connection. However, of course we had no way of knowing this since we were not notified of the flight change, and the ticketing agent didn't say a word to us about it when we checked in. The gate agent informed us that the flight we were going to miss was the only flight into San Antonio that day, so we would have to stay the night and fly out tomorrow. I was really upset because I was due to start a new job that day, and I was going to be damned if I missed my first day on the job due to an airline eff up. Finally after much begging and pleading, they agreed to switch us to American Airlines, who was able to get us home that day (they even upgraded us to first class for no extra charge!)

It all worked out OK, but I am still so burnt up about Mexicana switching flight times and not notifying us, and even issuing us boarding passes for a flight we would not be on!! I will NEVER, EVER fly with them again after this experience.