Mexicana website requests checkin 3 hours prior to departure (international flight from SFO). Is that really necessary? Does anyone have experience with the baggage cutoff times?

I know they are understaffed in Cancun, but no experience at SFO.

You can look for other threads in this forum regarding problems for not allowing enough time for chek-in with Mexicana. As far as I remember, they talk about CUN and MEX. I would be cautious, however. It is a known fact Mexicana has important problems with its land personel and work.

For those who are curious we arrived at SFO at around 4:45am for a 7:30am departure. There were at least 5 counters open and no lines. Next time I would sleep in another hour and arrive 2 hours before departure. (Also no security lines at that hour.) We could see the plane sitting there from the night before and they did not even fire it up or attach the jetway until about 1 hour before departure. Turned out to be a full flight.

I will report back from CUN in a week - last time we saw 3 hour lines for most US-based carriers but I'm told MX has the best operation here.

In case it's helpful to anyone, we arrived 2.5 hours before flight time in Puerto Vallarta last week (after all of the big news about needing to be there 3 hours before) and we're glad we did.

We were able to get in the very short Delta Medallion line, but the regular line was mega mega long (I'd guess 200 folks in it). Mexican check-in involves thorough hand searching of ALL CHECKED BAGS, so that takes 4 or 5 minutes once you get up to the counter.

Security wasn't bad - similar to what we do here in the US, but the boarding of the flight started the second the plane was cleaned. Literally, DL was boarding the 757 about 50 minutes before push back time. That's because each pax must also be frisked at the gate prior to entering the jetbridge.

We thought we'd end up with a full hour on our hands to roam around bored, but we didn't.