Introduction
Welcome to the second part of this short-series of flight reviews. For a change, not only did we not fly on a oneworld carrier, but we tried a new airline (to us), Mexican low-cost carrier Viva, previously known as VivaAerobus.
Living in San Diego, we're lucky to have nonstop service to many Mexican destinations from Tijuana airport, which is connected to San Diego by a cross-border foot bridge. The Cross-Border Express (CBX) facility is very convenient for Southern California residents as it saves a lot of time and effort in getting to Tijuana airport. Compared to San Diego airport, there are many more flights to Mexican cities from Tijuana, which can be reserved at significantly lower prices. As a major base for Volaris and Viva, TIJ is dominated by LCCs so if you're looking to fly Business class, there aren't many options outside of Aeromexico on a few routes.
For Spring Break this year, we headed to Mazatlán, Mexico to spend a few days at a beach resort. The city of Mazatlán is not served by any airline from San Diego airport, but is served by several Mexican airlines from Tijuana. Viva appeared to offer the best value with a roundtrip costing about $180 per person including a 10 kg (22 lb) carry-on, seat assignments in the extra legroom "Priority" section, Priority boarding, and up to 3 free itinerary changes.
The Viva website is modern and user-friendly. It was easy to understand the different fare types and ancillary options. For us, the "Light" fare bundle was the best option as it includes a 10 kg carry-on and a personal item.
We were able to add extra legroom seats with priority boarding for about $50 per person round-trip.
It's also possible to add on CBX tickets on the Viva website for about the same price as on the official CBX website (around $20-30 each way depending on the season).
Viva offer streaming in-flight entertainment, though there is a small fee, which can be added during the booking process or on board.
Routing
Enchainement de vols
- 1
- 2VB5043 - Economy - Mazatlan ✈ Tijuana - Airbus A321neo
Check-in & Lounge
After a lovely few days in the Mexican sun, it was time to head home to San Diego.
The Viva app was showing an on-time departure, and the assigned tail had been running on time for the day. There's always a high risk of a delay on afternoon and evening flights as it just takes a little delay earlier in the day to throw everything off. Luckily that did not look to be the case, unlike the outbound flight, which had been delayed about an hour a half.
The resort had provided a complimentary airport transfer, which departed from the hotel about 3h prior to departure and took a half hour.
The Mazatlan airport is on the small side, handling about 30 or so daily departing flights during that period.
Though we didn't have any bags to check, it had not been possible to get a boarding pass for my son on the app due to a Mexican law requiring an identification and document check at the airport for minors. For some reason this had only applied on this return flight as I'd been able to check in the whole family on the app for the flight down.
Luckily there was no wait for check-in as the counters had just opened for our flight, which looked to be the last departure of the day.
As we headed to the security checkpoint, the flight information screens confirmed we were on the last Viva flight of the day. The only other flight operating around the same time was a delayed Volaris flight to Mexico City.
As there were only two flights departing around the same time, security was mostly empty and quick, especially as approved liquids and electronics could remain inside cabin baggage.
Despite the airport's small size there is a Priority Pass lounge! I've said it before, but I find it crazy that several of the largest U.S. airports have no Priority Pass lounges, like LAX or DCA, when most medium-sized airports outside of the U.S. have them.
Staff were very welcoming and friendly.
The OMA Premium Lounge is quite small, much like MZT airport, but it was nice and quiet during the time we were there, with only a few other passengers in the lounge.
It was be due to the late hour, but there wasn't much of anything to eat except for a few carrot sticks and celery at the bar. A lounge employee came to our table with a choice of packaged sweet or salty snacks and took drink orders.
Boarding
We headed to the gate a few minutes before boarding was due to begin. On the way, there were fun AvGeek facts about Mazatlan airport on the floor as well as a maze and some games.
The gate was located on the lower level of the terminal since Viva mostly do ground boarding, much like in Tijuana.
Unlike it Tijuana, there wasn't enough space to have separate staging areas for boarding groups so when Group 1 boarding was called, we had to slalom through the crowd to get to the boarding podium.
Always love the views when ground boarding.
We find the same modern cabins as the outbound flight with a simplified LCC version of the Geven Essenza seat model. These seats are extremely slim with very little padding.
The VIP Priority section in the first 6 rows of this A321neo offers extra legroom. Though there are no official seat pitch numbers for the Priority seats, I would estimate it to be about 31". Not amazing, but a heck of a lot better than the knee-crushing 28" pitch found in the standard seating section.
Like many LCCs there are advertisements in the cabin, but they are mostly discrete as they are only on the bottom of tray tables and not on overhead bins like some airlines. There are also instructions on connecting to the streaming entertainment in the same area.
Seatback pocket contents
Looking at the buy-on-board menu, there's a decent variety of food, including several fresh options at reasonably low prices. I didn't get anything on this flight as I ended up sleeping for most of the flight, but I did order food on the outbound flight and found it to be a good value. Only the alcoholic beverages are on the expensive side, almost at U.S. price levels.
Viva have an in-flight magazine, which is quite rare these days.
Viva's domestic and international route maps
There's also information on the streaming entertainment
Streaming IFE is still not very common outside of the U.S., much less on a low-cost carrier. Being that Viva is an LCC, it's not surprising that the IFE is not free, but it's pretty accessible at only 55MXN (less than $3 US).
The Flight
Not only was the flight on time, we were due to arrive into Tijuana ahead of schedule.
After takeoff, you can follow along the progress of the flight for free through the entertainment portal.
I fell asleep as soon as we took off and didn't wake up until we were about to land in TIJ. This time I knew ahead of time that the seats were hard so I made my own extra padding with a folded up hooded sweatshirt hah
Looking out over the city of Tijuana towards the U.S. border on landing.
We landed well ahead of schedule and parked at a remote parking stand.
Unlike the outbound flight, we were further from the terminal so buses were waiting to transfer passengers to the terminal.
With no checked bags we immediately made our way to the CBX bridge where we went through U.S. immigrations and customs and were back across the border in the U.S. just minutes after landing.
It seems the majority of our flight was local domestic traffic as there were very few people crossing the CBX bridge so it was super quick to get through U.S. formalities. We have Global Entry, but it was just as fast through the regular lanes with so few people. I did find it a bit confusing at the procedures at CBX Global Entry were slightly different than arriving internationally at an airport as technically it's a ground border crossing. There weren't the usual Global Entry kiosks, but just a facial recognition camera. Agents instructed us not to have our son go to the facial recognition camera, whereas at Global Entry in U.S. airports, we're always instructed to use the facial recognition at the kiosks, though that's always hit or miss with kids due to their changing facial features as they grow.
Thanks for reading!
