My family and I (6 adults) would like to go to Cancun this summer. Flights from Houston are running around $500 roundtrip, but if we fly from Monterrey Mexico, the flight is around $250. This means we would have to drive to Monterrey (we live just south of Austin). It’s about a 5 hour drive, and we have heard that if you stay on the toll roads, it’s pretty safe. Anyone have any experience driving in Mexico? Recommendations?
You might want to consider a direct bus from Austin to Monterrey. The bus would be cheap and comfortable. Taking your own car entails a lot of hassle at the border, a minimum of an hour for tourist cards and car papers, you’d have to buy Mexican insurance for your car, maybe about $75 but I haven’t priced it in a long time. You also won’t need to worry about parking your car at Monterrey airport.
The Greyhound will connect at the border with a Mexican bus company, and the bus will wait at Migracion for you to get papers – that will be about 20 miles into Mexico from the border. But maybe, four RT bus tickets would eat up quite a lot of what you’d save on the plane tickets.
I’ve been driving in Mexico for many years (without any incident of any kind), but always because I needed my car when I was down there. I consider it a perfectly safe country to drive in, provided you keep in mind the foibles of unfamiliar driving customs.
Is you and your family members personal time worth more than $20 and hour? If not then sure go for it.
6 hours including border crossing x 2 (each way) = 12 hours
Savings per person = $500 - $250 = $250
Savings per hour = $250 / 12 = $20.83
I wouldn’t do it.
Is there a reason you’re looking at flights out of Houston instead of Austin or even San Antonio, or is that a typo?
I would consider that by driving to/from Monterrey for your flights you’re basically wasting two days of your vacation. The flight times from Monterrey are similar to Houston/Austin/SAT so you aren’t even shaving off any time there. I would be looking for a cheaper destination before considering driving 5 hours for a cheaper flight.
I’m not seeing any advantage to what you are proposing. The drive both ways, the border hassles both ways…it wouldn’t be worth it to me at all. “Minimize your therbligs” should be a mantra for vacations.
Personal time is worth exactly zero, unless it is time that you would have otherwise spent to earn money or with a reasonable expectation of doing so… Their week of “personal time” in Cancun, 168 hours, is not worth $3,360.
Try flying from Austin. Because Houston is a hub (both Hobby HOU & GBush IAH) prices are high. From AUS you might save money despite the plane change in Houston or DFW.
Did you investigate the Mexican airlines Volaris & Go? Or did you just look at US airlines? I don’t know which cities they serve in Texas. But they’re renowned for low prices.
Be sure to stop at the border when entering Mexico and get the proper papers for your car; they will just wave you through but if you don’t stop and get the papers, at some point in the interior you will be stopped and sent back to the border if you don’t have the documents. It’s about import taxes – if you take a car into Mexico, you can’t sell it, you have to take it back out of Mexico.
I’ve driven many miles in Mexico without incident. Just take it easy and have fun – the journey is part of the vacation.
My personal time is worth significantly more than $100 and hour. Each individual places their own value of their time. I’m sorry you place so little value on your own time.
I’m sure you place some sort of value on your own time. Otherwise, are you completely self sufficient and never pay anyone else. Do you grow all of your own food? If not, you must have decided that the time saved buying food grown by someone else was worth not doing it yourself.
Southwest offers direct flights between Austin or San Antonio and CUN. The OP could also look into charter vacation options like Apple Vacations that might operate out of a nearby regional airport.
I tend to be of this point of view. I mean, when I work, I bill at $150-$300/hr, but when I’m not, I don’t put that kind of value on my time. Sitting around picking my ass is not worth $20/hr. I’m happy to spend an hour in transit to save $20. I’ll watch my YouTube videos on the train nstead of at home. But, as said, this is everyone’s own personal caluclation to make.
I have more money than I shall ever need in my lifetime, so my time is not something that can be measured in any monetary denominations. There are things I would rather do than tend a garden, but the time spent growing food or doing something else is of the same value to me.
Last year I spent 20 hours on airplanes or airports, at the end of which I was in Addid Ababa. The return on the 20 hours was to be where I’d rather have been, instead of my own house, for the next several weeks, and it was “worth it”. That was a value that exceeded any amount of money. I don’t care if you or anybody else values those 20 hours as being worth $400 or $4,000. I earned nothing during those weeks in Ethiopia, but I certainly do not begrudge the loss of X-dollars an hour of my time while I was there. – or getting there.
Later this month, Im going to Suriname for a week. If you called me and said cancel my trip, and instead work for you the whole week, and you’d pay me a good realistic wage, I would just laugh. You couldn’t pay me enough. Time is NOT money. It is days of my life. I don’t need any more money, and will not spend the remainder of my life acquiring it.
But none of that is my point. Let’s say you think your time is worth $20 an hour. You have to drive across the city, and spent a quarter of an hour stopped at traffic lights. Would you have made an additional $5 that day, if youj had hit every light green and did not spend that time, which you say is money, at those red lights? How, exactly, in each of those one-minute intervals, would you have made 30c? By doing what? That’s why I said it just as I did: Time is worth money only if you could or would have realistically spent the time earning its cash value.
I think some folks are getting a little too literal about the value of their time.
When factoring for cost there is often a difference in time.
Example you are flying from San Francisco to Manila
Option A: Non-stop 14 hour flight $1000
Option B: flight that has a 4 hour layover in Seoul, SK and a 4 hour layover in Bejing, China. All told 24 hours of travel time $750
Is twiddling your thumbs for an extra 10 hours worth $250 (25/hr) to you.
It depends when those hours are but, typically, that’s about where I would take the $250 in savings. But I also don’t mind layovers. And it’s $250 more I could spend on my vacation! Yay!
Mexico security forces are currently engaged against a capable criminal insurgency in areas near the border and along key smuggling routes. Aside from the cartels that enables other organized and violent crime due to weak rule of law in the contested areas. Those areas can be quite dangerous. Given that my general recommendations:
- Get some more professional input for your risk assessment and planning, like say theDepartment of State’s travel warning for Mexico
- Plan your route accordingly and then compare it to DOS’s warnings.
- Do your utmost to try and stay out of areas where the State Department bans non-essential travel by, and requires extra security precautions of, it’s personnel. It’s not good to be on the wrong end of “our response time to emergencies involving U.S. citizens may be hampered or delayed” if there’s another decent option.
- If you do find your route going along a generally safe route through an area that has issues, make a conscious effort to pay attention to that areas possible threats so you can keep an eye out.
You might want to also check out this article on Driving In Mexico. Don’t forget to figure things like toll costs and insurance (your US insurance does not cover you) in when considering the differences in the cost between flying and driving.
It points out some areas like insurance and tolls that you need to figure into your plan. Traveling along the roads, instead of just being at a resort, might make you rely more on your cell phone. What’s the coverage of your carrier along those routes and what extra costs are associated with international coverage on your plan?
On top of all that, what’s the Monterrey airport like? Just another hassle, I think. Suck it up and fly from Texas.
Actually the Monterrey airport is modern & efficient. It’s also not very large, so it’s easy for passengers to negotiate. It’s on the scale of Austin, not the scale of Houston Bush.
Gotta be careful though. Two stopovers and plane changes are also two opportunities to miss your connection due to whatever. And thereby lose 24 or 48 hours of your vacation.
As a non-revenue passenger I’m especially sensitive to the risk of not making it all the way to the destination. But professionally speaking I’d say that non-stops are worth a hefty premium for the reliability they supply. As a worker I’ve certainly had a hand in delivering tens of thousands of people into misconnects at our various hubs over the years.
For trips wholly within the US or western Europe it’s not such a big deal; there’s relatively many flights per day for each city pair. So if you get stuck along the way your next flight opportunity is often just a couple hours later.
OTOH on long haul international a missed connection may cause a 23-ish hour delay. With the need to find overnight accommodations in a country you weren’t planning on sleeping in and may not have a visa for. Rest assured *that *little adventure will definitely be the most memorable part of what’s left of your vacation. And not in a good way.
Something else to consider about stopovers. If all segments are on a single airline then they will take responsibility for getting you accommodated on the next flight at no extra cost to the degree any seats are available. But if you assemble your own itinerary out of separate purchases of segments on each carrier, then when carrier #1 delivers you to the stopover point after carrier #2’s flight has left, carrier #2’s customer service response is gonna be something like: “Sucks to be you. The next open seat is a full fare next Wednesday. You want it or not?”
When the itinerary is sold as a unit across multiple airlines in an alliance the marketing goal is to be like case #1. Often the reality is more like case #2 just due to prioritization schemes of own-line customers over partner customers versus the very, *very *few empty seats on most flights to most destinations.
It seems that in your situation, instead of not having any value, your time is infinitely valuable.
I think there may be some confusion on the exact terms, but the point remains that hours or days of your time are worth something to everyone, and that should be factored into any savings from flying through other airports.