Flight cancellations are a nightmare for travelers, but hundreds of tourists from Minnesota were stranded in Mexico after an airline abruptly ended its seasonal service.
According to The Associated Press, Sun Country Airlines was forced to cancel its flights from Los Cabos and Mazatlan Saturday due to storms in the area.
Unfortunately, the journeys from the Mexican tourist hotspots were the last flights for the season and the carrier couldn’t send another plane to pick up the stranded passengers as it would have resulted in canceling flights to other destinations.
The impacted travelers were forced to find other ways to get home from Mexico, but Sun Country said it was issuing a full refund for the return portion of their flight for everyone stranded due to the storms.
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As a result, United States Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota called on federal transportation officials Monday to look into the cancellations and determine if the airline had done enough to protect its customers in the ordeal.
“As many travelers are already financially squeezed by the airline industry, it is troublesome to see a domestic carrier abandoning its passengers in a foreign country, forcing them to find their own way home and to incur further expense of time and money,” Smith said in a letter to the Department of Transportation.
The incident comes at a time of change for Sun Country, as the airline was recently sold to Apollo Global Management. The new ownership group announced in February it plans to cut 350 jobs from the airline’s ground service operations at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.
