The other day I got a call from the United States. “Peter Greenberg is in town and would like to interview you for his radio program,” a cheery voice said.
A quick Google search enlightened me. Peter Greenberg, I learned, is known as The Travel Detective and is considered the world’s top travel journalist. He is, in fact, an award-winning investigative reporter and a best-selling author to boot. Greenberg has won many Emmy Awards for investigative reporting and has been given personal tours of their countries by the King of Jordan, the Prime Ministers of Israel and New Zealand and in the case of Mexico by none other than President Felipe Calderon.
“Of course I will let him interview me,” I replied, adding, sotto voce, “and maybe I can manage to interview him too.”
Unfortunately, Greenberg had picked a downtown hotel for his interviews, right next to Avenida Alcalde, which is literally being torn to pieces, the air billowing with clouds of dust as well as the earsplitting roar of jackhammers and bulldozers building the city’s third subway line.
“That Travel Detective is pretty clever,” I thought to myself. “I bet the hotel is paying him to stay here.”
My interview was a bit of a disaster as I was asked not to name a gorgeous canyon, a spectacular waterfall or a fire-spitting volcano, but a “good place to eat in Guadalajara.”
“Eat? Well, to tell the truth, my favorite place to eat in the city is Sirloin Stockade!” Well, I never got to tell him about this restaurant’s economical, “all-you-can-eat” buffet, featuring what seem like thousands of choices, all delicious and highly unlikely to leave you with Montezuma’s revenge – because of the hearty laugh that met my unexpected gastronomical suggestion.
Nevertheless, Greenberg very kindly agreed to let me interview him.
“What are you doing in Guadalajara?” was my opening salvo.
“I’m doing a story on Volaris, an airline that is probably the fastest-growing in Mexico and may soon be the largest in the country. You know all about it because you live here, but it’s not really on most Americans’ radar ... and yet, Volaris flies to almost two dozen U.S. cities and has become an economically viable alternative.”
Greenberg pointed out that Volaris was modeled to some extent on Southwest Airlines. Apparently, the airline took into account Mexico’s robust bus network and ingeniously decided to match bus fares.
“They are allowing people to switch from a 27-hour bus ride to a 2½ -hour plane trip for about the same amount of money ... it’s revolutionizing the way many Mexicans are traveling.”
Exemplifying how Americans could take advantage of Mexican flights, Greenberg told me he had come to Guadalajara by first driving his car from San Diego to the Cross Border Express bridge over the new border (crossborderxpress.com). “I parked, walked 400 feet over the bridge and found myself inside the Tijuana airport. It took about seven minutes. And the connectivity of the TJ airport is amazing! They have 40 different flights. You can go anywhere from Oakland, California to Shanghai in China. Aeromexico actually has four nonstop flights going there every week! Who knew? Well, now we know!”
Greenberg’s research on Volaris is for his PBS series called The Travel Detective, now in its fourth season.
“We don’t talk about Lovely London or Beautiful Bermuda or exquisite models on the beach,” he told me. “We’re telling you which cruise ship has an environmental problem, which cruise ship has a great safety program, which airline does excellent maintenance and at which hotel you’re likely to get burglarized ... things you want to know when you travel. We’re doing a feature on Volaris because nobody knows them! For the bulk of my audience, Volaris is a secret airline and we are now going to let people in on that secret.”
During his stay in Guadalajara, Greenberg also interviewed Enrique J. Beltranena, the general director and CEO of Volaris and considered one of Mexico’s 300 top leaders by Líderes Magazine.
“We started Volaris ten years ago,” Beltranena told Greenberg on air. “We saw that Mexico’s middle class was growing phenomenally, from 18 percent to 50 percent in only 20 years. Our country has one of the best road networks in the world and we have the second largest bus market in the world, carrying 27 billion passengers per year. So we developed an airline that can compete with any bus trip taking more than five hours. From 2006 to 2016, Mexico’s air passengers increased from 22 million to almost 40 million, and 51 percent of this growth is due to Volaris and our bus-switching strategy. So you could say we put wings on a bus, but we are doing it with first-class aircraft.”
When Greenberg mentioned, as an example of how Volaris’ prices are competitive with bus fares, that his flight from Tijuana to Guadalajara had cost a mere US$80, Beltranena interjected, telling him he could have got the same ticket for US$68, “if you had purchased it in advance.”
It is, of course, possible to get even greater bargains on Volaris if you follow the steps below, outlined for me by Jeff Madison, an experienced traveler from Denver, and one of those few people in the United States who appears to have discovered Volaris all on their own.
1. Volaris has several websites and not all of them work in the same way. I suggest you go to nuevo.volaris.com.
2. Select English.
3. Select one-way or round trip. So far I haven’t seen any great advantage to buying round trip.
4. Plug in some dates initially to get to the Select My Flight page. Then click on the Search by Price icon on the upper right side.
You can now search over a period of weeks or months and see the price of a ticket day by day. For example, I looked for the cost of a one-way ticket to JFK from Guadalajara and found prices ranging from US$126 to US$316. And here is some great news for Peter Greenberg: If you follow Jeff Madison’s Four Steps, you can come back to visit us in Guadalajara next June 27 for a mere US$47.35.