My wife purchased a trip for four to Cancun last fall for this years spring break. It is my daughter's senior year so my wife flew in her cousin from Az. as a surprise. We got to the airport at 5 am. on Sunday morning and were directed to the passport Kiosk. I will never forget the look in my wife's eyes when she found out our card passports were not valid to fly to Mexico. We had to spend Sunday in the Twin Cities and Monday morning we had to go to the federal building to get our pass port book. The trip cost us and additional $1800 dollars and we lost two full days in Mexico.
Once we got there our hotel was excellent and everything from the shuttles and food and beachfront were excellent at the Occidental Costal, recommended by Triple A.
When we got back home I called AAA to complain that no one had mentioned to my wife that we needed the Booklet passport. I inadvertantly got the Twin Cities office and they said that should not have happened, their office requires you to send them a copy of the passport to verify that everything is valid and the names are the same on the boarding pass as the passport.
To their credit they refunded us the $800 for having to rearrange our flight, which instead of being non stop flew us to L.A. first. So instead of 4.5 days in Cancun we had 2.5 days at a cost of roughly $7000.
No one to my wife's knowledge asked her if she had the right passport or wanted trip insurance which "may, I don't know" have helped.
The only thing that bothered me was the agent who sold us the trip never apologized. According to his Manager hethought that he done everything correctly.
Moral of the Story, have the right Passport and the right travel agent.
Don Hummer , Lake Shore, Mn. read more
