An Easy Travel Hack for Island Hopping in the Caribbean
Traveling through the Caribbean is easy if you base out of the beachfront airport at Sint Maarten.
The idea of island hopping through the Caribbean sounds so glamorous, doesn’t it? Just popping into beach bars from the BVI to the Grenadines, greeting your other island-hopping friends over bushwhackers and tropical sunsets.
If you happen to be a gazillionaire or The Talented Mr. Ripley, maybe that’s how it goes. For everyone else, island hopping takes a little creativity.
But it’s not as hard—or as prohibitively expensive—as one might think. You don’t need to charter a catamaran or find a friend with a private plane. All you need to do is find a flight to Sint Maarten.
Sint Maarten—the Dutch-French island east of Puerto Rico and the USVI—is home to Princess Juliana International Airport. You may recognize it from the famous photos of planes that look like they’re about to land on unsuspecting sunbathers. The airport serves as a hub for much of the Eastern Caribbean, a sort of DFW for the lesser Antilles where you can secure a connection to just about anywhere. Plus, the airport recently finished its post-Hurricane Maria renovation and repairs, and with new electronic passport control, transferring through is often easier and faster than at many other U.S. domestic hubs.
A handful of inter-island airlines operate out of SXM, most notably Winn Air and Air Antilles. Flights run about as much as a one-way domestic flight in the U.S., from around $80-200 per leg. The fun, little prop planes can take you to a dozen different islands in under an hour, and to St. Barth in a scant 15 minutes. Saba, St. Eustatius, St. Kitts, and Anguilla are all 25 minutes or less. Guadeloupe, Antigua, Dominica, and Puerto Rico are all reachable in under an hour.
If flights seem too costly, or you want to island hop on the water, you can also catch several ferries from Sint Maarten. The closest is directly across the street from the airport terminal, a 20-minute ride to Anguilla that’ll run you about $75 each way. Take a 30-minute taxi to the French side and Marigot harbor, where you can jump on a regularly scheduled public ferry for about $25, although the ticketing booths don’t sell advance tickets.
The glamorous shores of St. Barth are only an hour’s ferry ride away, which you can take from Marigot for $55-65 each way. Saba—the volcanic island that’s like a European village set atop a tropical mountain—is only 90 minutes away from Simpson Bay via ferry. That ride costs $75, but it doesn’t run every day. All of the aforementioned ferries are bookable through St. Martin Bookings.
In a week, you could legitimately hop to five different islands, with a day to enjoy the French and Dutch sides of Sint Maarten on either end. Using SXM as your base is an ideal hack to explore the Caribbean from somewhere other than a cruise ship. The best part? Only one flight from the US is required.
Matt Meltzer is a Miami-based writer who’s been covering food, events, and travel in Miami for over a dozen years.