Skimming through travel articles, a piece stressing the need to always be prepared for the worst case scenario caught my eye. I should have read it before my recent trip to Texas.
Actually, the trip there was awesome! Arrived on Friday night and spent the weekend at my granddaughter’s baby shower, opening Christmas presents with family, playing board games and cheering for everybody in the big bowling tournament. I’d planned carefully for the trip there, getting my COVID test the day before the flight and carrying my results, my vaccination card and my health attestation along with me everywhere and everything had gone smoothly.
It was the trip back to Cancun and our resort I should have spent more time preparing for. Several days in advance I had gone online and reserved my transportation from the Cancun airport to the resort and made sure I received an email back from the company saying my transportation was scheduled. However, I failed to read through the actual email and verify all the information. All my problems would have been avoided if I had done that. My flight from Dallas arrived in Cancun at 12:36, a prime time for confusion. AM or PM? Somehow my transportation had been scheduled for 12:36AM instead of 12:36PM. Whether there was a shuttle waiting for me 12 hours earlier I’m unaware, but there was definitely not one waiting for me at 12:36PM.
Of course, I didn’t know that immediately. So when my search outside the airport terminal failed to find the shuttle company, I thought they were just late. As taxi and shuttle drivers in the unique shirts and colors identifying their resorts and/or companies massed around me and gathered up their passengers, I stationed myself beside a white pole and watched for the blue shirt the driver of my shuttle company wears. Numerous taxi drivers and other shuttle operatives stopped to ask if I was waiting for them. I blightly replied no and waited, and waited, and waited. Finally I checked the email receipt and quickly identified the problem!
My husband was back at our resort, since he had not flown to Dallas with me. So my next response was to contact him and see if the resort could help pick me up. Of course I had been surfing the web while waiting for the shuttle to come, so now my phone was down to minimal battery life, with no outlets or extra battery packs on hand. So our conversations were short and not-so-sweet with me turning my phone off between each. Basic result was that no other guests were coming to the resort that day, so there would be no later shuttles that day I could pick up (this was a Tuesday morning, so not a typical check-in day). I’d need to take a taxi.
Now the Cancun airport has a monopoly system for transportation from the airport. Only certain taxi companies and shuttle companies are allowed to pick up new airport arrivals. So while we have an awesome taxi driver we always use outside of the airport, he is not allowed to drive into the airport to pick me up, and I would have to walk several miles with all my luggage to get outside of the airport property. So I was forced to use the airport sanctioned companies. One of the sanctioned company’s drivers had stopped by my white pole lookout several times already to see if I needed a ride. He looked the typical scammer – very attractive, very friendly, overly concerned young man with a huge smile speaking fairly good English, so I had been rebuffing him regularly. Of course he stopped again right as I was entering panic mode over my transportation failure (I suspect he was watching my reactions while I was on the phone) and rather than analyzing all my options I told him I’d take his company’s taxi.
He pulled out an official looking poster stating the prices to all of the nearby towns and cities and the listed price for Puerto Morales was $78 USA, which seemed really high to me, as a taxi ride to the airport from Puerto Morales runs about $50 USA. Immediately a different man in a different shirt color who had been standing close by and listening to our conversation said the airport set the prices. I could go over to the taxi booths and compare prices, but they would all be same. A co-conspirator?
After agreeing to the $78 USA, I ran into a huge problem. No, they did not take credit cards. No, they would not drive me to the resort and let my husband meet us and pay the money to the taxi driver. They needed cash up front before we left the airport. And the total amount of cash I had in my billfold was $3 and a bunch of change.
Of course my young scammer could handle that – there were ATM machines inside the airport. He encouraged me to use the machine that gave out pesos as paying in pesos would be cheaper for me (which often is the case with the different exchange rates) and it would then only cost me 1950 pesos. He took me up to the security guard at the terminal door and explained in Spanish that I needed to go back inside to the ATM machine, thankfully convincing the security guard to allow me back in. I did say a few words in Spanish to the guard, at which point my taxi man exclaimed in a worried tone, “You know some Spanish!” His sudden concern with me knowing Spanish should have been a warning, but I was too far gone into panic mode.
Now came the battle with the ATM machines. Usually there are two machines sitting beside each other, one dispersing pesos and one dispersing dollars, with the ATM fees being much cheaper for the peso machine than for the dollar machine. So I first went to the peso machine. Of course the peso machine did not like my debit card and refused to acknowledge that it was even a valid card. Moving to the dollar machine beside it, I discovered it also refused to acknowledge my debit card. And yes, I have credit cards, but I’ve never used them at an ATM and did not know any of the PIN codes needed. Now my anxiety was at it’s peak as I wildly looked around to see if there were any other ATM machines. I finally found a line of people in a side hallway and yes, another ATM machine was there!! This was a machine that dispensed both pesos and dollars and seemed to be working.
When my turn came, I happily put in my debit card and the machine acknowledged it! A low balance warning text for our checking account had come through that morning before I left Dallas, so I needed to take the money out of our savings account with the debit card. So I chose Savings and 3000 pesos and tried to calm down, only to receive the message that the funds were not available.
I packed up all the stuff falling out of my billfold and turned on the phone for a last call to my husband to tell him I’d just be living in the airport until a shuttle came from the resort in the next few days. But wait, he’d also gotten the notice about the low checking balance and had transferred the money from savings to checking just that morning!! Hope renewed, I wildly pulled cards back out of my billfold, found the debit card and inserted it again, asking for 3000 pesos from the checking account. I accepted all the fees, caring less what they were. And I received my money!
Now, to pay the fees and finally be heading to the resort! The beautiful young man was still waiting outside the terminal doors, beaming a huge white teeth smile at me when I finally came out. It had taken so long, I bet he thought I’d snuck out a different way, which I should have done.
Taking me over to his company’s booth, he took the 2000 pesos I handed him and gave me back $2 USA, which would have been about 40 pesos, so he shorted me 10 pesos but I didn’t really argue at that point. He wrote out a receipt for me and gave me a copy with basically only the date and his name on it. I knew I wanted to get the money back from the resort, so I said he needed to write the amount on the receipt. He took only my copy and marked something on it, handed it back to me, grabbed my suitcase and headed off to the taxi parking lot. I had to almost run to keep up with him.
When he got to the taxi lot, he quickly told the driver, who did not speak English, that he needed to take me to Puerto Morales, put my suitcase in the trunk, and he was gone! I climbed in the taxi, noticed a big sign saying my fee did not include a tip that would be appreciated by the driver. As the taxi driver drove us out of the airport, I finally started to relax. I looked at my copy of the receipt again, to find that Mora, the name he had put on the receipt, had only checked the pesos box and had not written the amount down. Suddenly with my brain re-engaged I realized that 1950 pesos was actually $100 USA, not $78. And of course, there was no written proof anywhere that I had paid that amount and I really doubted the poor driver of the taxi was getting any of the extra Mora had ripped me off for!
And yes, I should have checked my shuttle arrangement details carefully ahead of time, I should have made sure my phone was fully charged and had a back-up battery along, I should have had more cash on hand, I should have had more funds available in both my checking and my savings accounts, I should have known the PIN numbers for at least a couple of my credit cards, I should have remembered beautiful smiling Mexican boys cannot be trusted, I should have slowed down and made everyone around me slow down so I could think, and I should have kept calm enough to calculate my own conversion of US dollars to pesos!
Of course, then I wouldn’t have a worst case scenario to write about.
Grandma's Travels and Thoughts 