TravelTalkOnline Forums Travel and Vacation Forums St. Maarten - St. Martin Departure

As I mentioned on another thread, we flew home yesterday. We had read how quickly the new departure system was but we found the contrary. We dropped off our car with Lesley from Kenny’s at departures easily and even though we had checked in with Westjet online we had to obtain paper boarding passes when we dropped off our luggage. Check in went smoothly and we proceeded to the self scan gates before going up the escalator. There was something wrong with the bar code for Westjet however and all passengers had to manually show boarding passes when we and passport before going up. On getting upstairs we encountered a line going towards the security screening. Being tall I was able to see over the screen and observed a mass of people waiting for security. Once we got past the barrier we noticed six rows of zigzag lines before the screening area. After performing the airport shuffle for 40-50 minutes we arrived at screening to see that there are three screening stations but only one was functioning. Given that United, American, Air France, Westjet, and Sunwing has flights, it appears that there is a management or staffing issue. All in all it took over an hour which about the same time we spent last year pre new system.

And that was a weekday too. Yikes.

Wow! That was unfortunate and not at all encouraging. Unless it is a shortage of trained staff, it does sound like management may not be aligning their staff assignments to match the flights being processed. Hopefully it improves significantly!

Another example of the ineptness of the airport and management.

We departed 12/11. Front door to gate about 15 - 20 minutes.

We had a completely different experience on Friday. We didn't have a bag to check, so went right to the scanners below the escalator, scanned our boarding passes and were cleared up to security, where we passed through fairly quickly. My bag was shunted to the side for some reason, but it was not searched, so not sure what that was about. On to passport control, where you insert your passport, smile for the camera, and move right on through. I didn't time everything, but I'm sure it was less than thirty minutes. No jetway at B1, but we walked to the plane. The only hiccup what that the plane's land power system failed as we were taxiing, so we were towed back to the gate where maintainance was able to solve the problem. We were about an hour late; fortunately, we had an overnight in CLT, so no problems with a connection.