Tijuana International Airport — Attraction in Baja California

This airport will prepare you for your trip into Mexico...where appearances count for everything and danger is like a sleeping giant. Floors are polished, the bathrooms work well. Cheap refreshments are as expensive as they are in Frankfurt...except that they couldn't give change for a 100 peso bill.

You'll see lots of formidable security people near the eating places looking busy and mean. Meanwhile....serious breeches of security occur everywhere and go completely ignored. At our gate, an "emergency door" was opened by some passengers that leaned on it. This caused a shreeking alarm to go off and gave passengers at the gates undeterred access to things like...oh....planes, jet fuel, baggage loading trucks...pretty much anything we pleased. About 15 minutes of bewildered amusement passed before some cute women in white uniforms showed up to shut the door. That was kind of them to do that so that the real guys didn't have to.

This was amusing since checkpoint security had just prohibited my wife's 3 lb jogging-weights to board the cabin because they appeared to have metal inside of them. This was supposedly a threat to the safety of the flight because it could mean that drugs could be inside the weights. We were told that they should have been placed in checked bags instead, where ...presumably...the carefully hidden substance inside the weights would present a lesser threat. The logic to all of this escapes me.

In light of the unchecked, open access to airport operrations, this was a complete random interpetation of laws and safety protocol. That's because the item posed no risk to the flight and is not prohibited by any law other than his own gut feeling.

The "security" officer was now preventing (laughably so) a family (with children) from transporting a fitness item on carry-on luggage, simply because it appeared possible for us..a family of four... to be transporting controlled substances inside the cabin of a national flight, even if such suspected items would pose no risk to the flight.

There is a difference between hazards to a flight..and hazards to the suspected consumption habits of a family of four within the cabin of a national flight.

I will investigate (in the U.S.) the actual danger associated with a 3 lb rubber jogging weight (PINK) in the hands of a traveling family with two toddlers. I suspect that any suspicious item at security should go through a spectroscopy machine to check for chemical signatures. They have none in TJ. or...didn't use it.

In order to be taken seriously by the rest of the international traveling community, airport security at TJ should consider the difference between a WIDE OPEN security breech, and a remote speculation about the metallurgical content of fitness weights in hand luggage traveling southbound by an American family on holiday traveling southbound from Tijuana....away...

Tijuana International Airport (Spanish: Aeropuerto Internacional de Tijuana), officially Aeropuerto Internacional General Abelardo L. Rodríguez (General Abelardo L. Rodríguez International Airport) (IATA: TIJ, ICAO: MMTJ), is an international airport located 5 km (3.1 mi) northeast of downtown Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico. It serves Tijuana and the surrounding San Diego–Tijuana metropolitan area, home to a population of five million.

The airport functions primarily as a domestic gateway, serving a network of 37 domestic destinations.[2] It is a hub for Volaris and a focus city for Viva. Additionally, the airport houses facilities for the Mexican Air Force and supports cargo flights, tourism, flight training, and general aviation. It is the westernmost airport in Mexico and the second-northernmost, after Mexicali International Airport. The airport is operated by Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacífico. Situated adjacent to the Mexico–United States border, Tijuana Airport is a geographically binational airport, having direct access to its terminal from Mexico and from its Cross Border Xpress (CBX) facility in the United States. This rare feature allows passengers with a boarding pass to walk across the border using a dedicated pedestrian bridge.[3] The airport ranks as the fifth busiest in Mexico for both passenger numbers and aircraft movements,[4] and holds the 16th position in Latin America and the 47th in North America. It handled 8,925,900 passengers in 2019 and reached 12,545,800 in 2024, of which 4,114,100 were international passengers using the CBX...

Tijuana airport is totally great until you see people not wearing any type of face protection, security personnel walking around knowing about the pandemic, and not enforcing the social distance. Prices on the court food very impressive, one small bottle of water 40 pesos, subway, Starbucks, tacos, and any other vendor exploding the source of the travelers. The real importance for a traveler is security in every way, throughout Tijuana airport many people pass for instance of to visit the family, wait to move from one place to another, o the reason to look for a better life with the intention to stay for future plans. Other bad review is the monopoly of Taxis in the airport, many companies working for the airport, and for the SCT (government transportation) who rules the entire airport, not allowing to decide the traveler, they will have only one choice the taxi, many Uber or Lyft drivers are required to pick you up out of the zone of the building. Taxis are completely dirty, run out of technology, and the prices are in dollars. At the end the traveler will need to have more choices, not the company's around to exploding the people bucks. ☆☆

Besides those issues, I enjoyed my time waiting for the arrival of my familiar, the tea in the Starbucks was extraordinary, at one point was tented to go to the tacos place but, then I observed very well the place, and those tacos was not the real tacos, more inclined for Americano. Then I decided to wait and go to taste some real Tijuana's tacos with rare meats, trying to give something new to the palate....