Festival-goers, foodies and spring breakers are in luck: flights to Mexico are likely to get much cheaper in 2024.
Though the travel experts at Going report that the number of people who flew between the United States and Mexico last month rose 33% from pre-pandemic totals, affordable flights have remained hard to come by.
“That surge in popularity has made finding cheap flights to Mexico tougher, at least on some routes and dates,” Going’s Founder and “Chief Flight Expert” Scott Keyes wrote. “But there’s good news: We may be awash in cheap Mexico flights soon.”
Last month, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) updated Mexico’s aviation safety rating to Category 1, bouncing back from a Category 2 designation given in May 2021.
With the highest safety rating restored, Mexican airlines have returned to adding new routes to the United States. Earlier this month, Aeromexico and Delta Airlines announced a partnership that will service 17 new routes between the two countries, and Viva Aerobus has rolled out five new U.S. destinations: Austin, Denver Miami, Oakland, and Orlando.
Both Delta and Spirit Airlines will also begin servicing new direct routes from the U.S. to Tulum in March of 2024, with departures from Atlanta and either Orlando or Fort Lauderdale, respectively.
As a result, the total number of U.S.-Mexico flights in the next six months has risen by 10 percent from where it was a year ago, according to aviation analytics company Cirium.
These new Tulum routes will coincide with the grand opening of the city’s newly built Felipe Carillo International Airport (TQO), which follows the 2022 opening of a second major airport in Mexico City (NLU), both of which allow airlines to add even more flights.
“The number one driver for cheap flights is competition, so as more routes get added by more carriers, we will likely start to see which cities come out on top for cheaper flights to Mexico,” Katy Nastro, a spokesperson for Going told Travel and Leisure.
Featured image from Pexels.com.
