Maho beach departure time

[kaisatsu]

From skimming old posts, it seems that a lot of people plan to leave Maho Beach in the early afternoon (13-14). Since I see that a majority of ships leave at 18:00 or later (we're scheduled to depart at 19:00), why do people advise leaving shortly after noon?

 

I'm curious, because the A330s coming in from Europe will land around 14:30-15:30 the day we're in port. If we wanted to stay to see the wide-body jets land, would we have trouble getting back?

[crewsweeper]

It's the traffic in the late afternoon and early evening as to why people leave early.  Remember, the flight schedules are on St Martin time and your ship time may or may not be different.  Also even though your ship doesn't depart until 1900 you'll most likely have to be on board between 1800 and 1830.

[KatieDub]

On 12/18/2022 at 7:09 AM, kaisatsu said:

From skimming old posts, it seems that a lot of people plan to leave Maho Beach in the early afternoon (13-14). Since I see that a majority of ships leave at 18:00 or later (we're scheduled to depart at 19:00), why do people advise leaving shortly after noon?

 

I'm curious, because the A330s coming in from Europe will land around 14:30-15:30 the day we're in port. If we wanted to stay to see the wide-body jets land, would we have trouble getting back?

How did you get the schedule of the planes for they day you're there?

[kaisatsu]

2 hours ago, KatieDub said:

How did you get the schedule of the planes for they day you're there?

https://www.flightradar24.com/

A few weeks before we left, I looked at flights into St.Maarten on the same day of the week that we would be there and checked what kind of aircraft they were using.

 

I was hoping to use the live flight tracking while we were there, to know when the bigger flights were arriving and where the others were coming from, but I had no cellular data access on my plan.

 

In the end, the Air France flight was close to scheduled time, but KLM took off late from AMS so it didn’t land until after we headed back. Our taxi driver said that traffic gets quite bad around 17:00 due to rush hour, so we chose to start our trip back at 16:00.