TravelTalkOnline Forums Travel and Vacation Forums St. Maarten - St. Martin Please help with a decision

We are scheduled for a week in late October at OBBR---flight from Charlotte on AA. My wife loves Orient Beach. However, she is concerned about this trip and is now saying we should consider canceling. What factors are you weighing in making your decision about visiting this fall? Is it too early to make the decision to pull the plug on this year's trip? What will AA require of us to cancel? How about OBBR?

In the final analysis, if my wife is uncomfortable, we won't go. What would you tell her to alleviate her concerns, or are her concerns spot on?

MXS--You have a while before your trip. I would give it a couple months wait to hear some reports from people who travel down, and see how the world situation is by then. Things can change a lot in couple of months.

You still have 4 months. The virus began about 4 months ago and has now begun to slow in most areas. The island would not allow people to travel to it if they had fear that we would bring the virus to them. If all safety precautions are followed, I believe you would be safe if you went. But...I too would wait until a few weeks before your scheduled flight before making the final decision. If you canceled now and all is better in a month or two, you will be upset for making a decision too soon. We too are scheduled to go in late October into November. We were supposed to have gone in May for 3 weeks, but that never happened. We rescheduled for the same time as you and will wait until perhaps 2 weeks before to make our final decision. Good luck...and maybe we will meet you in SXM this year.

We are a GO for the end of October too!!! BSV and Delta booked and paid for!!!! As I see it on other forums, the island she tough as nails is coming back! Irma gave her a bad beat down. She'll weather through this too. You have over 120 something days before you have to think about pulling the plug. It's like following the weather, keep your eyes open. Check with your carrier and OBBR now about there policies. But if your wife is uncomfortable flying in general. Don't force it.

Is your wife concerned about health issues or the hassles of traveling? If it's health issues, you're probably better off in SXM than in the U.S. Almost every country in the world is doing a better job containing the virus than the U.S. Just make sure you have some medical evacuation insurance to get you home if there's a problem, and follow sensible precautions - masking in public when in doors, social distancing, etc. If it's the hassles of travel, you have to consider if a few hour of miserable travel is worth a glorious vacation on SXM. Either way you have plenty of time - wait it out for a while and see. Personally, I'm not scheduled to go until January and I'm about 90% confident of making the trip

Agree with others. Wait 2-3 months before deciding. We're headed down in December and very optimistic that we'll be enjoying the New Year there (good riddance 2020), but will be checking with AA and SXM blog regularly.

Agree with the "give it a few months" thing.....

Planning on lateDecember arrival and staying a few months. Hopefully everything is fine on the island by then and they are excepting tourists with no quarantine by then.

I'm still very hopeful for our mid-January two week visit at SBR

Like the others above have said I would keep monitoring the situation. There are so many unknowns at the present time that none of us can really provide you with a definitive answer. But, I do believe it is still important to plan and look forward to future trips to SXM. My personal opinion is that I would wait until the emergence of an effective vaccine is in place, which I believe will arrive later this year and most likely in December. COVID-19 is still going to linger and hang around until a vaccine takes it out once and for all. Multiple bio tech companies around the world have entered human clinical trials with their vaccine protocols, with some looking more promising than others. Vaccines that prevent SARS-Cov2 infections will most assuredly come, but the challenges will then center around the mass production of the vaccine(s) and the distribution of it to the public. Let's hope this goes better than the testing for this disease from earlier this year.

As for an October trip, I would keep close watch on the status of COVID-19 cases on St. Martin. Not necessarily the number of new cases being reported (because that increases when additional testing occurs), but the number of hospitalizations on both sides of the island if that information can be obtained. The severity of any disease hinges on how many people wind up in the hospital, so that's worth paying attention to. If this number is increasing in July and August, I would postpone your trip until early 2021. But, if the numbers are steady or decreasing it may be worth holding on to your plans. I can't tell you how AA will handle things, but I wouldn't wait until the last minute to postpone your flight arrangements. Hope this helps.

I think the number of cases and hospitalizations in the home state or country would be more important than cases in SXM..

SXM could be at zero and would like to stay at that number and should be expected to refuse entry to visitors from those places with high numbers.

As of June 12, the most recent updates that I can find, Sint Maarten reported 0 active cases, and Saint-Martin reported 1 active case.

Is your week at OBBR an owner's week? If so, remember that you have until September 15th to etiher deposit with II or push it into 2021 when you can then either use it or deposit it.

Is anyone considering quarantine insurance? We are desperately wanting to be in SXM in December for our usual two weeks. However, we are very concerned about what happens if we get Covid while we are down there. I'm not (that) concerned about surviving it even in SXM. But concerned about what happens if we have to quarantine down there?

Is there such a thing as quarantine insurance?

Carol ... I worked with insurance for 37 years and never ran across or heard of quarantine insurance. Of course, these are unusual times and some companies that specialize in travel insurance may now be offering additional coverage that would include this, but my speculation is that this would apply to "enforced isolation" situations only. When shopping around for travel I would strongly recommend reading the fine print carefully and if this the language is not clear ask the agent directly about this coverage. Can a separate endorsement be added to include this coverage? How much does this add to the total cost? I would also suggest reviewing the terms and conditions of the credit card one may have used to book their vacation. There could be some coverage imbedded within the terms of the credit card that may kick in for certain types of delays, though I very much doubt it would deal with something like a 14-day quarantine period.

How would Quarantine Insurance even work if it did exist? I'm hoping that Medical Evacuation will get me home in the unlikely event I get the virus.

Medical Evacuation? Check the fine print.

There is. But we have a lot of research to do about it before our trip in December. I'd like to know that if one of us gets it and the other doesn't, we would have some recourse.
Does Medical Evac cover coronavirus?


We had talked about that as well.

I'm just getting ready to post a link to a talk by the SXM tourism minister, which covers this topic, as well as the current requirements to enter SXM. If I understood her correctly, that current insurance policies will NOT cover quarantine OR COVID 19 evacuation. She is in the process of trying to arrange for such insurance locally, similar to that in Aruba.