This past summer I went to Cancun for vacation. The people I went with thought it would be a good idea to go the cheap route and fly home on Spirit Airlines. I had never flown on Spirit before, but I had never heard a good thing about it. I knew going into the flight that the seats were going to be terrible and uncomfortable. We get to the airport around 6am to get through TSA and what not. Everything was going smooth. We are all exhausted from a week-long trip full of sun and margaritas, so at this point we are all ready to just be home.
About 30 minutes before we are supposed to board our flight, we hear a voice of the intercom saying that our flight would be delayed 30 minutes and that they had no information at this time. We all look at each other and think are you serious. It wasn’t the end of the world because we would still make our connecting flight in Fort Lauderdale. The 30 minute wait goes by extremely slow because the airport was freezing. Anyway, we hear the intercom go off again saying, “your flight is delayed another hour, there are mechanical issues with the plane.” We’re all thinking great, at this rate we are going to miss our connecting flight and then we will be stuck in Florida. An hour hasn’t even passed yet and the intercom goes off again this time saying that the flight is cancelled. Immediately everyone runs up to the little kiosk in front of our gate screaming and yelling at the workers. Obviously we were pissed off about it, but we immediately started looking for other flights leaving Cancun so we could just get back onto US soil. We kept looking for flight after flight on every airline possible and there was absolutely nothing that was going to get us home that day.
The intercom goes off again saying that there is a smaller plane coming to take as many people who want to leave to Fort Lauderdale. At this point it was obvious we would mis our connecting flight, but we all agreed we would rather be in a hotel in the US where there isn’t a language barrier than be stuck in Mexico in some random hotel the airline puts us in. So we’re waiting for a couple hours expecting to be leaving Cancun to Florida around 7 pm. As terrible as it was sitting at the terminal, I was having a great time watching everyone yell at the attendants.
The flight that was supposed to come at 7 never ended up coming. The airline had to put us in a hotel for the night. Luckily we were able to switch to an American airlines flight that would take us from Cancun to Miami, and then Miami to Tampa bay, and then Tampa Bay to Philly. We ended up getting to the hotel at around 11 pm and only got a couple hours of sleep, because we had to wake up at 4 am the next morning to get on our early flight. After a good 36 hours of traveling we made it back home.