About this site

We cover one thing: sunrise balloon flights over the Teotihuacan valley, about 50 km north-east of Mexico City. We do not own balloons, employ pilots, or sell tickets.

What we actually do

There are five bookable balloon listings covering this valley across GetYourGuide and Viator, plus a handful of Mexican operators selling direct. Most pages you find when you search for these flights are either a single operator's marketing or a blog post about one morning somebody had in 2019. Neither tells you what you need to decide between them.

So we read the listings, all of them, and record what each one includes: where the van collects you, whether breakfast happens in a cave or a hall, whether the archaeological zone ticket is bundled or an add-on, what the cancellation terms say. Then we check the rules that govern the flights against primary sources rather than against each other.

Where our facts come from

In descending order of how much we trust them:

• Official and primary sources. INAH's own page for the Teotihuacan zone for hours, entry fees and site rules. AFAC, Mexico's civil aviation authority, for what a commercial balloon pilot must hold. UNESCO for the World Heritage listing.
• The operators' own published terms. Age minimums, weight limits, pregnancy rules and weather-cancellation policies are quoted from the operator that publishes them, and named as such, because they differ between companies.
• The live GetYourGuide and Viator listings. Ratings, review counts, prices, inclusions and durations, recorded on the date we checked them.
• What travellers actually report. Recurring complaints from Reddit and review threads, used to describe patterns rather than to make claims of fact.

What we refuse to publish

This is the more useful list. When a number does not exist, we say so instead of filling the gap:

• Cancellation rates. No operator at Teotihuacan publishes one. Any page telling you "only 5% of flights are cancelled" invented that.
• A single cruising altitude. One operator publishes a working range; balloons do not fly a fixed profile, and a precise-sounding figure would be false precision.
• How many balloons launch each morning. Nobody counts them publicly.
• Dawn temperatures in degrees. We will tell you it is cold before sunrise at 2,121 metres, which is true and useful. We will not print a number we cannot source.
• Any claim that balloons fly directly over the Pyramid of the Sun. They do not, and the marketing photos that suggest otherwise are doing a lot of work with a long lens.

How we make money

Links to GetYourGuide and Viator on this site are affiliate links. If you book through one, the platform pays us a commission and you pay exactly the price you would have paid going direct to the listing. It does not add anything to your bill.

The obvious risk with that model is that it tempts a site to rank whatever pays best. Our defence is mechanical rather than moral: the flights on this site are ordered by the review count each platform publishes, which is the only booking-volume signal either platform exposes. If a listing with 21 reviews paid triple, it would still be fifth. The full disclosure is here.

Who writes it

A named editor with a real byline is joining this site shortly, and their name and credentials will appear here and on every article when they do. Until that happens we have deliberately published nothing in the first person and made no claim to have been in a basket over this valley ourselves. Everything on the site is reporting: what the listings say, what the regulator requires, what INAH charges, what travellers describe. Where we could only find one source for something, we name it.

If you spot something wrong, or you run one of these operations and a detail here is out of date, email us and we will fix it.

Start here

If you are deciding whether to do this at all, read is it worth it. If you have decided and you are choosing between listings, the flight comparison is the fastest route. If you are worried about safety, the safety guide deals with it directly, including the accident question people are really asking.