Flying from Cancun to Los Angeles with Delta

A Delta Boeing 737-800. Photo / Pat Bell

Adrian Schofield flies DL938, from Mexico, to the USA

The plane: Boeing 737-800, a type you'll see a lot of in the US.

The seat: 24C, about four rows back from the wife and kids. I didn't plan it that way, honest. The seat was comfortable enough for a medium-haul flight.

Price: $570 for a one-way flight. Like most US carriers they also charge for checked bags, which on this route was $40 per bag.

The airport: Cancun airport has been upgraded significantly in recent years. Good range of food outlets and shops. This is now the second-busiest airport in Mexico, thanks to the growth in traffic to the resorts of the Mayan Riviera. Congestion in the terminal can be a problem, on Saturdays in particular. It was all self-service check-in for Delta, although the card readers were down so we had to pay our bag fees at the bag-drop counter, which slowed everything.

Flight time: 4hr, 45min.

On time: The departure time was altered by 40 minutes soon after I bought the ticket. The flight left at the revised time and arrived about 20 minutes early.

Fellow passengers: This is firmly a leisure route, so it was all vacationers coming home. The plane was full.

Food and drink: You get a bag of nuts for free, but if you want anything more substantial you have to bring your own or buy on board. It was early enough that they still had their breakfast menu, so I ordered a croissant with turkey and cheese. Not that great, particularly for $12. Other options were a continental breakfast (yoghurt, breakfast bar, grapes and a strawberry) for $10, or fruit and cheese for $11.

Entertainment: There were good and bad aspects. First I tried their on-demand offerings, which were pretty limited. The touchscreens were very unresponsive, requiring so much prodding it must have annoyed the hell out of the guy in front of me. And the flight tracker was obviously set up for a different flight, showing we still had eight hours of flight time when we landed. However, the live TV options more than made up for the other shortcomings. Among the 18 channels of live content was NBC, which meant I could watch the first race in the America's Cup finals during the flight. I think sporting events are the best showcase for the benefits of inflight live TV.

Would I fly them again? I'd probably shop around, because there are plenty of options for flying to the Mexican tourist hotspots from the US. I tend to think, however, that full-service carriers like Delta offer more support than the low-cost airlines when things go wrong.