Flying to Mexico with a cat

Now with the shipment of the van arranged “all” we had to do was to book 2 flight tickets with a company that allows pets in the cabin to Veracruz.

We soon found out “all” would cause a lot of stress and a lot of time as well. Let’s start with the price. Many sites offer cheap tickets. But if you click on the offer, you get redirected to another site. While you are waiting for it to load, you get a pop up saying “ oops, the flight company has changed the price”, yeah right and the real price is suddenly 3 times more expensive. So it started with us having to avoid all these sites, meaning most of the sites that offer tickets. It then turned out that flying directly to Veracruz or even Mexico city would be very expensive, around €1900,- p.p., one way! Well more like no way. So I started searching more and it turns out that flying to Cancun is literally 3 times less expensive and an inland flight from Cancun to Veracruz is only around €80,- So that is why we are now flying to Cancun first. 

Since we want to take Binkie in the cabin with us, we had to find a company that allows that on intercontinental flights. AirMexico naturally offers a lot of flights to Mexico, but doesn’t allow pets in the cabin if the flight is longer than 6 hours. It takes about 14 hours to fly directly to Cancun. So we lost a lot of flight options with that rule. Another company that offering a lot of flights is Concord and they don’t have rules about the duration of the flight. But very confusing rules about the size of the carrier and the pet in the cabin. Apparently the animal has to be able to stand up in the carrier, but the soft shelled carrier can be only 20 cm high??!! What kind of dog or cat is less than 20 cm high? Especially since you usually can’t take animals younger than 16 weeks because of the mandatory rabies vaccination. And you can only phone them, which would be very expensive from Turkey and we honestly don’t expect a clear and helpful answer from a call center.

Lufthansa doesn’t seem to offer any affordable flights to Cancun. AirPortugal doesn’t seem to know for themselves if they allow animals in the cabin and a few smaller companies don’t have any information online at all and/or no way to easily contact them. 

KLM is the Dutch company flying to and from the Netherlands. They do have information online but I had a few questions and the only contact options are Whatsapp or FB. So I sent them an app. After almost a week, and a reminder from me, I got a general answer but not the answer to my questions… Lets just say I got a tiny bit irritated. Oh if only I were a cat…

Finally after another app to KLM I got my answer. After more online research and worrying we managed to book a flight with KLM on the 20th of January to Cancun. Then after making a booking (which you have to do first) we wanted to make a reservation for Binkie. But that didn’t work online for some reason. We send apps, messages and a mail, but we needed a reaction within 24hrs of booking because of the cancellation policy. Calling them would be extremely expensive until Kilian thought to download an app that made calling to landline in another country a lot cheaper, using the internet. We called and the request was made but we were told we would have to wait up to 48 hours until we would get an answer, sigh. …..Luckily we got a positive answer in the evening, hooray!

We will be staying in Cancun for about a week or 2 and then fly to Veracruz to pick up the van. Which will only take a minimum of two days of custom nightmare… So now all I’ve got to do is Book the inland flight to Veracruz and find apartments in Cancun and Veracruz that allow pets. Many accommodations say online they accept pets, but when I check they really don’t. So did I say all? AAAAARRRRGGGGHHH

When we arrive in Mexico we will be desperately in need for some V&V: valium and vacation.

Latin America better be worth it.