Being popular is great. But popularity brings its own problems - chief amongst them for airports is queues. And Cancun this weekend showed why it is a victim of its own success.
A flood of humanity was departing the soft sands and bright lights of this Mexican playground for visitors from North America, and Cancun Airport struggled to cope. The lines for that most active of Mexican immigrants, Continental Airlines, were the longest and most tragic. Average check-in time was at least an hour.
No wonder Cancun's privately owned operator ASUR is seeking permission from the country's Government to construct and operate a new airport on Mexico's Mayan Riviera. Judging by Saturday's crush, and admittedly this could have been the busiest part of Cancun's week, it could not come too soon.
There are plenty of carriers queuing up to join the queues at Cancun. One of the latest is JetBlue Airways. It launched daily Airbus A320 flights on 30 November between Cancun and its New York JF Kennedy Airport base. Read JetBlue chief executive David Neeleman's blog about the launch via this link. He is seen here doing the big foam scissors thing after touching down on the first flight last week.
In fact its flights will be popular, not only because it is a cool carrier but because switched on travellers will use the less frequent visitors to Cancun, like JetBlue, Spirit and United, simply because the check-in queues could be shorter. Continental suffers because of the sheer scale of its operation in Cancun.
Cancun and ASUR are between a rock and a hard place. Its aggressive route development programme is designed to pack the airport with aircraft and passengers.
ASUR needs strong revenues to invest in its proposed new airport. But these are suffering because of terminal congestion - the long queues give travellers less time and less inclination to spend. And we all understand how important non-aeronautical revenues are to airports.
on December 18, 2006 2:15 PM | Reply
Surely this is not the airport's problem but the airline's. I was in that same queue a couple of hours ahead of you and noticed there were many check-in counters that were not being used. Okay, so they don't 'belong' to Continental, but CO should pull its finger out and pay for more check-in positions. After all, it knows exactly how many passengers it needs to process - there are no surprises. I definitely won't fly continental when going to Cancun - and would even reconsider when flying to other places.....
In fact, the security check (which is controlled by the airport) was swift indeed. But then maybe that was because CO co-operated by processing its passengers veryyyy slowly.
Henk Ombelet