Sun Country Airlines takes heat for stranding customers in Mexico
A Senator has called for a review of Sun Country Airlines after it stranded passengers in Mexico over the weekend and simply left them to organize their own way home.
Sen. Tina Smith wants federal transportation officials to investigate how the airline was able to ‘abandon’ passengers overseas.
A very ill-timed winter storm grounded planes in Minneapolis and following that the airline had no more flights to and from Mexico due to the end of the scheduled seasonal service.
Those planes are required elsewhere on other routes and Sun Country has seemingly failed to arrange for passengers to be accommodated via other carriers.
They were told to make their own arrangements and pay for one-way tickets to get back home but will only be refunded for the cost of the canceled return flight.
"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," Sen. Smith said in a letter to the US Department of Transportation.
"We felt the best option for these passengers was to provide them a full refund on their airfare so they could get on their way as quickly as possible," Sun Country’s vice president of marketing, Kelsey Dodson-Smith, said in a statement to local media.
Passenger have been scrambling to get flights back home, spending thousands of dollars, with some passengers still stuck in Mexico.
"Our most challenging recovery situation remains to be our Los Cabos and Mazatln flights and we cannot apologize enough to those passengers," Dodson-Smith said.
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Editor for TravelMole North America and Asia pacific regions. Ray is a highly experienced (15+ years) skilled journalist and editor predominantly in travel, hospitality and lifestyle working with a huge number of major market-leading brands. He has also cover in-depth news, interviews and features in general business, finance, tech and geopolitical issues for a select few major news outlets and publishers.
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