Two planeloads of winter vacationers escaping from cold northern weather got a big surprise over the weekend when Sun Country Airlines told them they’d have to find their own way back from the sun.
The airline’s last two flights to Mexico for the winter were among those cancelled at blizzard-bound Minneapolis/St Paul, stranding the passengers waiting in Cabo San Lucas and Mazatlán to fly home on the planes.
The airline, whose flights all originate in Minneapolis and serve mostly warmer places, refunded the passengers tickets and told them to buy new tickets on another airline. The company told them that it couldn’t send planes to pick them up when the snow ended, because it needed them to start spring service to other destinations!
In an email to Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Sun Country said “As disruptive as the current situation is for the affected passengers, the alternative — canceling other flights to other destinations — would have been more disruptive to even more passengers.”
But stranded passengers didn’t agree. Some found that tickets home cost more than their original round-trips, while others had trouble finding seats. As one told a local TV station, “We are their customers, we are their responsibility to get out of a foreign country … Bottom line, even if the season is over, they have a responsibility to us, we paid them, we trusted them and they just abandoned us. That is ridiculous.”
