Just arrived for our first trip to St Barths! All of the planning and research paid off and we are enjoying a full week on the island
We flew JetBlue to Sint Maarten direct and connected with WinAir for our final 15min flight to St. Barths. Jetblue flight departed Boston, MA on time and landed at SXM a few minutes late. Once touching down at SXM we were shuttled to the terminal where we saw a line for "transfers". We also flew with only carry-on luggage so we could use the transfer line. We got in this line and the woman at the end told us that since we didn't have our boarding pass that we couldn't use that line and made us go in the normal line for immigration and customs. We kept asking people where we transfer for a flight with WinAir but they kept leading us out of the air-side part of the terminal and into the main departures hall at noon on a Saturday. You can imagine what that looked like, hundreds of people checking in for their flights. Finally scramble to the front of the line to the WinAir desk and she printed our boarding pass. We needed to then go through security AND immigration with hundreds of people. By some miracle we made a later flight but it was an unnecessary stress to start off the trip. I know there are VIP services to assist people during they transfer but it was expensive and our connection was too tight.
For us we will skip SXM next time and go with Tradewinds through San Juan :100:
We flew JetBlue to Sint Maarten direct and connected with WinAir for our final 15min flight to St. Barths. Jetblue flight departed Boston, MA on time and landed at SXM a few minutes late. Once touching down at SXM we were shuttled to the terminal where we saw a line for "transfers". We also flew with only carry-on luggage so we could use the transfer line. We got in this line and the woman at the end told us that since we didn't have our boarding pass that we couldn't use that line and made us go in the normal line for immigration and customs. We kept asking people where we transfer for a flight with WinAir but they kept leading us out of the air-side part of the terminal and into the main departures hall at noon on a Saturday. You can imagine what that looked like, hundreds of people checking in for their flights. Finally scramble to the front of the line to the WinAir desk and she printed our boarding pass. We needed to then go through security AND immigration with hundreds of people. By some miracle we made a later flight but it was an unnecessary stress to start off the trip. I know there are VIP services to assist people during they transfer but it was expensive and our connection was too tight.
For us we will skip SXM next time and go with Tradewinds through San Juan :100: