Flying Out of the Ciudad Juárez International Airport | Perks of Living in El Paso Texas

Flying Out of the Ciudad Juárez International Airport | Perks of Living in El Paso Texas

Hi, welcome to Living in El Paso, Texas. In this episode we're going to talk about one of the perks of living in El Paso and that is being able to fly in and out of the Juarez Airport. Hi, my name is John Peña and I'm Leah Peña and in this episode Leah and I

decided to take a quick trip to a small beach town in Mexico called Chile. Now since we live next to our sister city of Juarez, what we decided to do is actually instead of flying from El Paso and trying to get to a city in Mexico, we decided actually to just simply walk across the border and actually make our

flight from Mexico from the Juarez Airport. And so, now spoiler alert, we did have one little hiccup along the way. Definitely. But other than that, we're going to kind of break down the travel experience that we had in case you live in El Paso and decide to travel by air to, this could be someplace in Mexico,

Central America, South America, and quite honestly probably any international travel. Definitely. Yeah. So, okay, Leah, why would we, what's one reason why you or why we decided to fly from the Juarez Airport instead of the El Paso Airport? It's a lot quicker. Absolutely. So, if you're flying somewhere else in

Mexico, let's say, it's definitely quicker to do exactly what we did, right? And why is it quicker to do it this way? You're already heading in that direction. If you're gonna fly in the United States, you're gonna have to fly into Denver, to Houston, to Atlanta, and these take time and take multiple connections, potentially.

Absolutely. And the town that we actually flew from, or flew to, is Merida, which we'll put up here on the maps, a little town in, well, not so little, so town in the Yucatan. But, essentially, we had one connecting flight, right? One connection through Mexico City. Right. So, we went from Juarez, flew to Mexico City, and then

jumped on another plane, Mexico City to Merida. Now, we did a little bit of research, and if we would have gone from El Paso and tried to make our way to Merida, what would that have looked like? We would have had to go through Atlanta, Mexico City, and then Merida. So, two connections, and it would have taken over

12 hours. Flying through Mexico City out of Juarez cut the trip down to about six hours. Yeah, for sure. So, basically, you're looking at, you know, a half day of travel versus a full day of travel. So, that's definitely one perk of doing it this way. What's another reason why you might fly from Juarez instead of El Paso?

It is much more cost-effective. It's in a more affordable flights that you're gonna find, whether that's in Mexico or potentially in Central or South America as well. It's just less expensive to fly. For sure. For us, flying from Juarez to Merida was about $300 a person. Now, if we would have done El Paso to Merida, it

would have been closer to the ballpark of $800 to $900 a person. So, that's substantially more money. And also, we did a little research, too, because if you're heading to someplace, let's say in Central or South America, you know, it's the same kind of thing. We found, basically, Juarez to Costa Rica, you can

get a flight for about $200. El Paso to Costa Rica was about $700, I think it was. Yeah, $700. So, that's definitely, you know, if you're looking to save a little bit of money and avoid a little bit of hassle, maybe even cut down on some of the hours, it can be a good option for you. What are some cities in Mexico that

you can fly direct to? You can fly direct to Cancun, Puerto Vallarta, a number of inland cities, as well as to Mexico City, a few more beach towns, as well. So, there's direct flights out of Juarez to multiple cities in Mexico where you cannot get a direct flight out of El Paso to anywhere in Mexico. Yeah, absolutely.

Another kind of perk about flying from Juarez, if it kind of works with your schedule and your destination, is that it's a little bit easier to get through customs. What does that look like? So, for us, we walked over the bridge early in the morning. It took us a total of 10 minutes to walk over the bridge and

clear customs, and essentially, they opened our suitcases and zipped them back up. So, customs took two minutes, three minutes, to clear into Mexico. For sure. And another reason that we discovered, too, is the ease as far as COVID testing. How about that? Sure. So, Mexico does not require COVID testing at all

for air travel, where the United States requires COVID testing for all international air travel. So, essentially, by just walking over the border and flying out of Juarez, and then when we fly back to Juarez, we'll walk over the border and we'll avoid the whole COVID fiasco, which may not be that big of a

fiasco if you're at a resort and they offer that COVID testing for you. However, we chose an Airbnb, so it was a big perk for us. Definitely. And so, we've been kind of showing, you know, as we've been talking, we've been showing just some clips of our stay here. We did, like I said, stay in an Airbnb, and like Leah

said, yeah, our experience is basically, we had our daughter drop us off at the El Paso border downtown. We had our luggage, pulled it across the bridge, took about 10 minutes, and then what did we do? We got an Uber. Yep, and that cost what? To get an Uber from the bridge to the airport, it was $7.50. Yeah, and it took

about 40 minutes, maybe, to get to the airport? Total. Probably 10 minutes to get the Uber, and then 30 minutes to get to the airport. Ubers don't go into the airport, so again, you have a little bit of a walk. They kind of drop you off out in front of the airport. It's a small airport, just like El Paso. It's not much

of a walk. Yeah, definitely, and basically, we waited around for an hour and a half. We got there a little bit early because this is the first time we had done this before. We probably didn't need to get there as early as we did, and basically, we were able to board the plane and, you know, take off on time. Yeah,

smooth, easy, easy process, safe, clean, airport, no issues whatsoever. For sure, yeah, even us, you know, again, our Spanish is not good, so that was not a problem. Now, however, we did have about an hour layover in Mexico City, and we did experience a bit of a hiccup there. What happened to us there? Sure, Mexico

City is a huge airport, and so when we got there, we had to wait for a gate, not unlike you have to do at many big airports, so by the time we got to the gate, we were down to 15 minutes, maybe, at that, at best, before our next flight was to take off, and we didn't speak Spanish, which definitely made it a

little challenging to figure out where we needed to be to get on that connection. So, Mexico City does not have the big boards that have all of the flights coming in and out of the entire airport, wherever you are. I think it's too big, so they have it broken into alphabet, basically. There's A gates, B

gates, but they're all in Terminal 1, or they're all in Terminal 2, so you need to know what letter you're flying out of, not your gate number, so that you can get to the letter to figure out where your plane is actually taking off from. Yeah, definitely, and so, yeah, that was a bit of a stressful moment, but

we were able to figure it out. We did have to do a little bit of kind of hustling through the airport. We did a little running through Mexico City Airport, but they knew we were coming. It seemed like they kind of just, they had a bus waiting for us at Mexico City. We didn't have the, what's the thing called,

where you get the skywalk thing out to the plane. You had to take a bus and then walk up the stairs to get onto the plane, so the bus was waiting. There were a few of us, and they carded us out there, and off we went. Yeah, so, I mean, in the end, it worked out great. We actually ended up in first class on that flight,

which was awesome and very affordable, and basically, yeah, we made our flight to Merida, got the rental car, and, you know, here we are. So, all in all, we had a pretty darn good experience. Very affordable. Like I said, saved ourselves, you know, probably half a day, and now we're actually flying back tomorrow, so

if anything, you know, interesting happens, we'll be sure to update you on that, but other than that, we just kind of wanted to do an episode on, you know, the idea that if you are going to travel to Mexico, Central America, anywhere internationally, the option for you, if you live in El Paso, is that Juarez

Airport. It's quick, it's safe, it's affordable, and it's a great option. Definitely. Yeah. Happy travels from El Paso. Absolutely. Thank you.