TravelTalkOnline Forums Travel and Vacation Forums St. Maarten - St. Martin Kicking Back Now.

Monday, our flight arrived early but still had to wait for the %&**! bus. They had a separate line for pre-filled ED forms which we sped through, and then proceeded to bag claim, receiving our bags within 1/2 hour of landing. Picked up our car at Safari and then spent the next 75 minutes crawling to Grand Case.

Our immediate goal is to do as little as possible, and were are exceeding expectations. The new upstairs bar at GCBC is almost finished, and I'll post some pix soon, but for now I'll respect the "barricades".

The resident cats began meowing upon discovering their food source for the next 4 week was back. They have been keeping us company even though Picasso is still feral.

So far, all meals have been on-site, accompanied by many Ti-Punches.

Other than Moonset over DFW all the attached pictures on on-site at GCBC.

It's great to be back.

Sounds great! Looking forward to many more beautiful pictures in the next four weeks!

Picture #5 really speaks to me. Beautiful!!

It's amazing how the cats remember the people who feed them year to year. We had 3 cats at LaVista Beach that even seemed to know when we would arrive.

Beautiful photos! Enjoy your kicking back!😎😉

That doesn’t look your usual 5am flight out of DFW?

I prefer the 5 am with the 1pm arrival in SXM, but the Fare Gods weren't amenable to my desires. This was the 7 am departure.

What is your arrangement with GCBC? Is it a time share or do you pay for the 4 weeks like a normal hotel guest?

It's not time share.There is no time share on the French side.

If Motown Tim doesn't wish to reply I can add units are for sale outright but there's some kind of formula as to when and how long an owner can have use. They can also get rate reductions if they go beyond the negotiated use time. They may also get a % of rental collections, not sure about that exactly.

An efficiency unit sells for around 160 thousand euro.

No time share and we own 100%. We are allowed up to 84 days free/heavily discounted, but Americans are also subject to French immigration limits, supposedly 90 days pa. The rest of the year the hotel takes care of all rental related activities for which we have no input, and for me, that's a good thing.

so you "own" 100% for a limited amount of time?...assuming the unit is in use by others outside the time period you "own", how is that different from a timeshare?

We have the option of dropping from the rental pool if we want to stay full time, which we don't want to do.

Cruzer, Hope you enjoy your trip! A question on the pre filled ED forms, which I assume are the entry forms. Is there a form you had to print to show them or do they have the information there when you arrive? I went back into the emails we received to "retrieve application" on the SXM site and it gives me an error message "failed to authenticate". I did print out the information we filled out when we applied but I can't find anything we can bring "in hand" to show them when we arrive. Maybe I have the whole process wrong? Thanks for any help from your experience.

That sounds familiar to me. I believe that I just printed out the email, which had a seal/header of sorts for SXM and an id code that was my passport number. I showed them at the ticket desk, but also mentioned that it wasn't mandatory. The person was satisfied with that email print out.

Thanks cruzer. I made pdfs of our registration info and the notice that they received both of them.