With some time to spare during a recent trip in Mexico, I decided to take a little airline adventure. After some research I settled on journeying to the resort city of Huatulco, an hour’s flight from my base of Mexico City.

Several airlines ply the route, including all of Mexico’s major players like Aeromexico, Viva Aerobus and Volaris. There’s also Magnicharters, a small domestic carrier that runs holiday services between a few major cities and coastal resort towns.

All four airlines were charging roughly the same amount for a one-way Mexico City-Huatulco fare, plus or minus a few dozen pesos. But Magnicharters offered the best schedule for an outbound leg, plus the added bonus of being a new carrier for me. It has existed since the mid-80s, first as a charter operator for a travel agency and later as a commercial airline. And it has occasionally run routes north of the border to Las Vegas and Orlando. Today, it appears to operate less than ten routes in total, most only a few times per week.

Booking the trip on the Magnicharters website was a bit of an adventure. With no English version of the website available, the booking process tested my limited Spanish-language skills out of the gate. Thankfully, the booking process is basically the same everywhere, and it wasn’t all that hard to navigate. Google translate filled in a few gaps.

While the carrier accepts an impressive array of payment forms, my Chase Sapphire card payment failed to stick the first time around. A buzz on my phone indicated that the card had been frozen due to suspected fraud. Apparently, Americans don’t find themselves on Magnicharters all that often. For better or worse, I’ve faced this before. A quick call to Chase sorted it out, and the payment went through on the next try.

A confirmation email with several large blocks of text appeared later in the day, confirming the ticket. The email strongly suggested arriving two hours early, saying the counter would close at the two-hour mark. I strongly suspected that wasn’t true, but didn’t want to find out I was wrong. So there I was, two hours early at the Magnicharters counter at Mexico City International’s Terminal 1.

In order to check in, you need to have a printed copy of your tickets to simply enter the queue. A digital copy of the confirmation email won’t do, it turns out. For the record, the confirmation email did indeed tell us to print the tickets ahead to avoid a 200MXN fee. But for the life of me, I couldn’t find anywhere on the carrier’s website to do so, and neither could my likewise experienced travel-mate.

Sure enough, we got bounced to a separate counter where we paid 200MXN (US$10.25) each to get a printed ticket that allowed us to enter the queue to get another… printed ticket. Honestly it felt like a needlessly confusing process.

With the entire adventure set to span an afternoon, my only luggage was a small shoulder bag. Technically the airline allows two carry-ons with a combined weight of 5 kilos (11lbs) or less, an astoundingly low number that makes the 7kg limits common in southeast-Asia look downright generous.

Two checked bags appear to be included in the fare, with a combined weight limit of 25 kilos (55lbs) for domestic flights. International flights, which I don’t believe Magnicharters currently operate, have the same limit as carry-on luggage: 5 kilos between two bags. The airline charges a steep fee for being overweight on either checked or carry-on bags.

There weren’t many people ahead of us in either queue, but I never saw agents checking the weight of carry-ons. The same held true for agents at the gate.

After requesting a window seat near the wing, the agent at the second ticketing counter assigned us both window seats ahead of the wing. Nice!

If there had been long lines, all this fuss might’ve been a problem. But the wait for either queue was minimal, and the entire process took less than ten minutes. Security added another ten. And then we waited for an hour.

Boarding began on time in two groups: back of the plane, and front of the plane. I settled into seat 7A aboard our Boeing 737-300 Classic. Yes, you heard that right, a -300. The carrier operates five of the type. For folks that follow my reviews here, yes, the vintage plane type was a motivating factor behind choosing this airline.

This particular bird was originally delivered to Southwest Airlines in 1995, which was immediately obvious upon boarding. The seats are still exactly the same — colors and all — as they were when the plane left SWA for its first storage stint in 2017.

Besides a little logo on each tray table and an updated forward bulkhead, Magnicharters changed virtually nothing about the cabin when it pressed this old bird back into service in late 2020.

The cabin is arranged in an all-economy 3-3 configuration with 143 seats. Each seat has 32” of pitch and 17” of width. Being an older seat, they’re more squashy and have more recline than newer slimline seats.

With a load factor of maybe 60%, it didn’t take long to board or button up. It also meant that both myself and my travel-mate wound up with an entire row to ourselves. The airplane lurched into the air exactly on time, climbing low and slow over Mexico City before turning southwest toward Huatulco.

The onboard experience was friendly but sparse. A pleasant crew began a beverage service not long after takeoff. There were three choices: beer, Coke, or water. There is no inflight entertainment, no Wi-Fi, no magazine, no in-seat power, no nothing.

If you’re a 737 Classic fan, or simply enjoy the diverse landscapes of Mexico, the view out the window is certainly entertaining. But that’s it.

We landed less than an hour after we left, deplaning by airstairs onto a hot and steamy tarmac.

The Magnicharters ground experience is odd and confusing, and its onboard experience isn’t much to write home about. But it’s cheap, comfortable, and offers free beer on a vintage jet. If the airline happens to go where you need to go on a day you need to get there, it’s a usable option that you might overlook, but probably shouldn’t.

Related Articles:

• How a few tweaks could take Aeromexico 787-9 PaxEx from good to great
• With 787-9, Aeromexico can go full Pacific Rim in business

All images credited to the author, Jeremy Dwyer-Lindgren