La Paz or Los Cabos? The Airport Question, Answered Properly

October is when the flight searches start. The house is sorted, the month is picked, and then somebody opens a booking site, types in “La Ventana,” and discovers there are two airports that could plausibly get them here — one close with awkward flights, one far with easy ones. The message I get next is some version of: is Cabo really that bad?

I’ve said before, in passing, that La Paz is almost always the right answer. That’s still true. But “almost” is doing real work in that sentence, and since this is the week everyone seems to be asking, here’s the long version.

The short answer

La Paz is under an hour from La Ventana and El Sargento, down one road. Los Cabos is a little over two hours on a good run, closer to two and a half once you’ve cleared the airport and stopped for anything at all. So the question is never really which airport is better. It’s whether the flight into Cabo saves you more than the extra drive costs you.

For most trips it doesn’t. For some it clearly does. The trick is knowing which kind yours is before you book.

Why La Paz is harder to fly into than it should be

La Paz is a state capital, not a resort, and its airport is built for that. There are very few direct flights from the United States, and none from most of the cities my guests fly out of. The usual way in is to connect through a Mexican hub — Mexico City, Guadalajara, Tijuana — which adds a leg, a layover, and one more chance for a bag to miss its plane.

Los Cabos is the opposite. It exists to receive people from the US and Canada, so the direct routes are many, the fares are often lower, and the timetable has a lot more choice in it. On a booking site, the Cabo results nearly always look better. That’s the trap: the screen is only showing you half the journey.

What the extra two hours actually are

The drive from Los Cabos runs north up the east side of the peninsula, past Los Barriles, then through the little towns along the highway — San Bartolo has more speed bumps than seems strictly necessary — before you turn off on the paved road over the mountains toward Los Planes and come down to the bay. It’s a beautiful drive. It is also two-lane almost the whole way, unlit, and winding through the sierra.

Which brings me to the one rule I’m firm about:

If you fly into Cabo, land early enough to drive in daylight. If you can’t, don’t drive it that night.

This isn’t about crime. It’s that the roads in Baja are mostly unfenced, cattle and goats wander onto them, and after dark you see them about a second later than you’d like. Add the speed bumps you don’t know are coming and the curves you’ve never driven, and a tired person straight off a plane is the last driver I want on that road. If your flight lands in the late afternoon, either take a transfer and let someone who drives it weekly do the driving, or spend the night in San José del Cabo and come up in the morning. Both are fine. Doing it in the dark on your first night is not.

When Cabo genuinely wins

Here’s the “almost.” I’d book into Los Cabos, without much hesitation, if any of these are true:

• It turns two flights into one. A direct flight to Cabo against a connection to La Paz is often a wash on total time door to door, and one flight means one fewer place for a kite bag to get lost. For anyone travelling with a board bag, that last part matters more than the clock.
• The fare difference is real money. Not twenty dollars — enough that it pays for the transfer and then some. That happens, especially around the holidays, when La Paz seats are scarce.
• You were renting a car anyway. If you need a vehicle the whole stay, the drive up is just the first trip in it, and Cabo usually has more choice at the counter. Whether you need one at all depends on your house, which I went through in the car post.
• You want a night by the beach at the other end. Some people deliberately land in Cabo, spend a day or two there, and drive up rested. That’s a different trip, but it’s a good one.

When La Paz wins, which is most of the time

If you’re flying in from the West Coast, there’s an option a lot of people don’t know about. Tijuana’s airport has a bridge straight across the border from San Diego — Cross Border Xpress — so you walk over from the US side with your boarding pass and catch one of the flights to La Paz that run daily. For a lot of Californians that turns La Paz into a single short flight, and it’s the route I’d look at first.

La Paz also wins if you’re arriving late in the day, if you’re coming without a car and staying somewhere walkable, or if you simply don’t want your trip to start with a road you don’t know. Under an hour after landing you can be at the house. There are shuttles and taxis that do the run constantly — it’s a well-worn path, not an adventure.

And it wins on the way home, which nobody thinks about. A morning flight out of Cabo means leaving La Ventana before dawn or spending your last night somewhere else. A morning flight out of La Paz means breakfast first.

The one thing to check before you book

Price both airports with the ground leg included. For Cabo, that means the transfer or the extra days of car, plus a hotel night if your flight lands late. For La Paz, it means the connection and its layover. Then compare the total, door to door, both in money and in hours.

Most people who do this end up in La Paz. Some end up in Cabo, for good reasons. What I want to avoid is the person who booked Cabo because it looked cheaper, landed at six in the evening, and drove the sierra in the dark with a kite bag on the roof. That person arrives frazzled and spends day one recovering, which is a waste of a day in October.

The bottom line

Fly into La Paz if the flights are reasonable, and they usually are once you look at connections through Mexico — or through Tijuana, if you’re on the West Coast. Fly into Los Cabos if it saves you a connection, real money, or both, and plan to drive in daylight or let someone else drive.

The airport isn’t really the decision. The arrival time is. Get that right and either one gets you to La Ventana and El Sargento with the afternoon still ahead of you.

If you’ve got two itineraries open and can’t decide, send them to me on WhatsApp. I’ll tell you which one I’d take, and it usually takes me less time than it took you to find them.

— Diana