After the once-remote Mexican town of Tulum became trendy with the influencer crowd, both local authorities and airlines jumped on the opportunity to turn it into a tourism mecca.
Construction of the new Felipe Carrillo Puerto Tulum International Airport was completed in less than two years and airlines have already launched a rush of routes coming in and out of it. Flagship carrier Aeromexico (GRPAF) has already started running some of its 17 weekly routes to Tulum from other Mexican cities while U.S. carriers such as Delta (DAL) and American Airlines (AAL) are waiting to start running their flights when the new airport opens to international airlines in the spring.
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After Delta, budget airline Spirit Airlines (SAVE) was the second U.S. airline to announce new flights to Tulum in October 2023. Spirit was planning to start flying into Felipe Carrillo from Orlando and Fort Lauderdale on March 28 — the same day U.S. airlines will be cleared to start coming in.
Tulum is an ancient town that dates back to the Mayan period.
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Here is why you won’t be able to get a low-cost flight to Tulum anytime soon
But as first reported by airline outlet The Points Guy, the plan hit a snag due to problems with the engines for the Airbus A321neo (EADSF) planes Spirit had slated for the flights. The company manufacturing them, Pratt & Whitney, had to issue an industry-wide recall on a number of engines made between 2015 and 2021.
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The decision negatively impacted numerous airlines across the industry but, as Spirit uses many planes with this particular engine, the carrier has found it particularly difficult to run its flights. It grounded seven planes in August 2023 and, due to delays in the investigation over the engines, will still be unable to start running many planned routes in the coming spring.
As a result of the stopped service, Spirit has also had several bad financial quarters — last week, it reported a fourth-quarter net loss of $183.7 million.
Spirit apologizes, promises to ‘share more once we have an updated schedule’
When it was still planning to run the routes, Spirit was promoting the new flights to Tulum with $149 fares for those who booked their travel for the spring back in October. Now that the routes have been postponed indefinitely, Spirit said that it will be reaching out to affected customers with an offer of a refund or an alternative flight.
“We apologize to our guests for any inconvenience,” Spirit said in a statement to The Points Guy. “We look forward to the opportunity to serve Tulum in the future and will share more once we have an updated schedule.”
The delay has nothing to do with demand for Tulum itself, but simply involves the fact that Spirit is unable to use the planes it had slated for these routes until the engine problem is cleared by inspectors and the manufacturer.
“Spirit sees this route postponement as just that — a temporary shuttering of its plans for Tulum service,” writes Sean Cudahy of The Points Guy. “As airline officials noted in their statement, the carrier hopes to reinstate Tulum plans once practical, offering travelers an option to fly to the new airport aboard an ultra-low-cost carrier.”
