Visitors to Cabo San Lucas have a new low-cost airline option from the United States. Sun Country Airlines has added three flights per week between the Tom Bradley International Terminal at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) and the Los Cabos Airport.
Who is Sun Country Airlines
Sun Country Airlines is a low-cost Minneapolis-based airline that is the No. 11 largest in the United States, based on passenger volume. The airline has a hub in Minneapolis/St. Paul and focus cities in Dallas/Fort Worth and Las Vegas. It traditionally has focused on tourist destinations, which makes it a perfect fit for Cabo San Lucas.
Booking.comSun Country’s destinations in Mexico included Cancun, Cozumel, Ixtapa/Zihuatanejo, Mazatlan, and Puerto Vallarta. Cabo San Lucas was considered a seasonal destination until now.
The airline flies the common Boeing 737-800 series aircraft with seats for 186. Sun Country has additional codeshare agreements with Condor, Hawaiian Airlines, China Airlines, EVA Air, and Icelandair, providing additional domestic and international connectivity to Cabo San Lucas.
What This Means For Travelers
The addition of Cabo San Lucas as a regular destination for Sun Country Airlines provides additional low-fare options for travelers. The airline is expected to use connections in its key cities of Dallas, Minneapolis, and New York to transport travelers to the Los Angeles-Cabo San Lucas flight.
Making the flight more standard, instead of only seasonal in nature, and increasing the number of flights to three times a week, provides some competition to popular Cabo San Lucas airline carriers and may help lower the overall prices for the flights.
At a time when the local airport is expected to top eight million passengers this year, the low-cost option of Sun Country Airlines will make the premier destination even more accessible to tourists in the United States.
What Does the Future Hold?
As the popularity of Cabo San Lucas as a premier travel destination increases, other airlines may look at the opportunity of adding the city to their lineup. The airport is considered the sixth busiest airport in Mexico and one of the top 25 airports throughout Latin America.
The airport has two terminals – terminal one for domestic and terminal two for international. As the flights increase, the airport will need to undergo an expansion to keep providing gates for additional flights and carriers. The infrastructure of the airport is already considered insufficient for the increasing demand, causing a lack of available gate positions for aircraft during peak hours, as in many other airports in Mexico.
The Los Angeles route, which uses the Tom Bradley International terminal, is the top international destination for Cabo San Lucas, with more than 350,000 passengers in 2022. It is already served by a number of different airlines, including Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Delta Airlines, JetBlue, Spirit Airlines, and United Airlines. Sun Country Airlines will provide another option with connectivity elsewhere in the United States.
The leading low-cost carrier in the United States, Southwest Airlines, has instead decided to focus on flights to Cabo San Lucas from San Diego, Houston, Phoenix, John Wayne Airport (Orange County, Calif.), Denver, and Chicago.
Meanwhile, fellow low-cost carrier Spirit Airlines has focused on Los Angeles, Dallas, and Houston to Cabo San Lucas.
There are additional opportunities available for Sun Country Airlines to provide a nonstop flight from its focus city in Las Vegas, which is only covered by Frontier Airlines. It already has seasonal flights from its hub in Minneapolis and other focus city in Dallas/Fort Worth.