Note: This post was written just prior to Hurricane Irma devastating St. Martin. As St. Martin will be rebuilding the next few months or years, do your own follow-up research to ensure that conditions were restored similar to as described in this post.

My wife and I recently took a trip to the island of St. Martin, or St. Marteen depending on where you are on the island.

The island is split between two countries, with the south side being the Dutch side, St. Marteen, and the north side being the French side, St. Martin.

My wife and I don’t get to travel as much as we’d like, partially because she is finishing her masters program. Because she’s a hustler, she works full-time and takes classes with virtually no break from September all the way through late July.

The one advantage of this is that we are able to rack up a lot of travel rewards through travel hacking. I’ll touch on that later on in the post when I talk about costs of the trip, but first I’ll share about our trip and my thoughts on travel to St. Martin.

Getting to St. Martin

 
St. Martin has two airports, but almost all flights land in the bigger airport on the Dutch side, Princess Juliana International Airport (SXM). The airport is fairly modern and it wasn’t very time-consuming going through customs.

There are many major airlines that fly in and out of Princess Juliana International Airport, which is a bonus if you are looking to save money on flights. I should note that flights do not come and go continuously. Many flights depart and arrive from about noon through mid-afternoon.

The landing strip is very close to the ocean, landing directly over Maho Beach, which is a must-visit while on the island. More on that soon.

What We Did on St. Martin

 
Between my wife working full-time and getting her masters and me working full-time as well as working on a number of side hustles and projects, we can be pretty burnt out when we go on vacation. Meaning there is always a lot of time spent by the pool and beach, and this was no exception.

In fact that’s really the only criteria for travel for us: pool, beach, or some combination. It goes without saying warm weather is a requirement as well. St. Martin is famous for it’s beaches, so it met all our requirements, though our requirements hardly narrow down the options for travel.

We stayed eight nights at Simpson Bay Resort, which is one of the bigger resorts on the island. I was impressed at how little it cost for what we got. We spent slightly more than $100 a night and our room had a full kitchen. The resort has six pools – two large ones on the water and four additional ones throughout the rest of the resort.

Free parking and internet helped keep prices down further, and we ended up cooking for most of our meals. We rented a car, which I would highly recommend. There are buses but it seemed like tourists rented vehicles for the most part, and the rates were reasonable – we paid around $250 for the 8 days we were there.

I considered booking an airbnb, but I’m glad I went with a hotel instead. The cost of ~$100 a night was hard to pass up, as well as having access to so many pools and a private beach.

Considering how small the island is (34 square miles), there’s a lot to do on St. Martin.

One of the highlights of our trip was going to Maho Beach. Maho Beach is a relatively small beach, but the beach itself isn’t what people go there for. A short strip of beach and a two-way road is all that separates the airport landing strip from the ocean. Seeing planes land just overhead is something that you can’t experience just anywhere.

The best time to go is early afternoon. You’ll see planes of all different sizes land, and you can get some pretty sweet pictures.

There is a gated parking ramp next to Sunset Bar and Grill. You can park here for free as long as you get you purchase food or a drink and get your parking pass stamped.

Philipsburg, located on the south side of the island, has a lot to offer. There are countless shops, bars, and restaurants, not to mention a large beach.

If you want to spend time on the beach there’s plenty of chairs to rent, and oftentimes they come with deals at one of the restaurants (I saw one that was for two chairs, four drinks, $25). Otherwise there is plenty to see walking up and down the boardwalk and Front Street.

Philipsburg is where cruise ships port, so it can be very busy when one or more ships port. We went to Philipsburg twice, once with two cruise ships and once with no cruise ships. It felt really empty the day no cruise ships were there, and some restaurants were closed that otherwise would be open.

One highlight of Philipsburg was “The Lazy Lizard” restaurant. This restaurant is on the boardwalk towards the end closest to where cruise ships port.

We had nachos there and got free samples of the banana infused rum the owner sells. It’s so good we ended up buying a bottle to bring back to the States. Now that I’m here, I’m wishing I had bought more.

The owner is in his mid-thirties and I was a big fan of his hustle. He wasn’t in the back managing the business, he was up front making sure customers were happy and taken care of. St. Martin has a slower pace, so to see someone hustling like that stood out. Definitely check out The Lazy Lizard if you are ever in St. Martin.

Mullet Bay Beach is another beach on the south of St. Martin, located in close proximity of Maho Beach. There is no charge for parking at Mullet Bay Beach, but the parking area is in pretty poor condition as the concrete has eroded quite a bit. Nevertheless, it’s tough to argue with free parking.

This is a truly beautiful beach, and a big one at that. We didn’t stay too long but had already spent a few hours at Maho Beach. There are plenty of beach chairs and umbrellas you can rent if you want to stay for a longer period of time.

A sidebar for all my history nerds: there used to be a resort on Mullet Bay called Mullet Bay Resort and Casino. The property was destroyed by Hurricane Luis in 1995 (which caused $3.5B of damage on the island), and later demolished. From what I’ve read Mullet Bay Beach used to have a different feel with the former property overlooking it, but with the property now demolished you wouldn’t even know it was there unless you had read the history behind the area.

Fort St. Louis was built in 1789 and the remains of the fort can be toured today. Being a history geek, I definitely wanted to give Fort St. Louis a visit. Even if you don’t like history it’s a great place to visit because of the views of the island as well as Anguilla a few miles north.

As long as you are parked in Marigot you should be able to easily walk to the fort. There is some parking along the hill up to the fort, but it seemed easier to park elsewhere.

I would recommend Fort St. Louis because of the views. It’s also a great excuse to stop in Marigot if you are staying elsewhere on the island.

While gambling doesn’t really fit with our “make more, save more, live better” theme of this website, my wife and I enjoy going to the casino. St. Martin has more than 10 casinos, none of which are anything outrageously nice or comparable to, say, a casino in Vegas.

The Hollywood Casino was within walking distance of our hotel, and is actually in the middle of Simpson Bay Resort. While I can’t speak to the other casinos on the island, the ventilation was awful in this one, so if you have an aversion to smoke or the smell of smoke, you likely will not do well here. They have free valet parking if are driving there.

My wife played blackjack and slots and I played in poker tournaments two of the three nights. As an American the poker tournaments were interesting to say the least. Feel free to skip these bullet points if you don’t care about poker, but here are a few of my observations:

• Typical starting stacks were 5k in chips. But…if you registered “early” (any time prior to start time) you would get twice as many chips.

• There was unlimited rebuys, but you could rebuy for two different amounts of chips. Either a full rebuy or a partial rebuy where you get less chips.

• The tournament director puts chip stacks in play even if no one has bought in yet. So you may be playing with six people but have four chip stacks that are just slowly getting blinded out.

• If you buy in late you do not get a full starting stack. Instead you get one of the stacks that have been getting chipped away. And if you replace another player’s spot, you get less chips (i.e. perhaps only 2.5k instead of 5k, depending on when you buy in).

• Starting stacks are virtually irrelevant, because there is an add-on available for purchase at the break that is typically approximately six times the starting stack. For example the add-on would be around 30k chips if the starting stack was 5k. The name of the game is surviving to break and then purchasing the add-on

• Free food was brought out for all the players at the “dinner break.” I’ve never seen anything like this in the United States – I wasn’t complaining! I snuck some food to my wife who was playing blackjack.

• After the break is over and the add-ons have been purchased the rest of the tournament is essentially standard.

Keep in mind that I only played poker at one casino, so I can’t attest to whether this is the norm. With that being said, I would be prepared for things to be a bit different from a rule perspective if you play poker in St. Martin. Despite the wacky rules and structure I personally really enjoyed playing poker in St. Martin and would do it again if I came back.

Other Things To Do on St. Martin

 
We didn’t have time to do everything on St. Martin. A few other popular tourist activities include:

• The Butterfly Farm – There is a butterfly farm on the east side of the island that is a popular place to visit.

• Grand Case – Grand Case is on the north side of the island and is home to “restaurant row,” a series of pricey restaurants. Many of the restaurants have rave reviews. If you’re cheap like me you will likely avoid this area as well ;)

• Loterie Farm – One thing I wish I had made time for was visiting Loterie Farm. You can zip line and do a ropes course here, as well as eat at their Hidden Forest cafe. They recently added a pool & lounge area recently as well.

• Day Trip to Anguilla – Anguilla is a small island north of St. Martin. It’s close enough that you can take a ferry over in the morning and return the same day.

Saving Money on Travel to St. Martin

 
A friend who follows me on Instagram asked me how my trip was, and was curious if it was an anniversary trip. I said “no, just a trip.” He said “wow, that’s a nice trip!”

While travelling to St. Martin sounds expensive – and it certainly can be – we made this a super cheap trip. We saved money on almost every aspect of the trip from flights to hotel to food.

Here are some tips on saving money on travel to St. Martin:

We saved a lot of money on our flights to St. Martin. We bought the flights using United airline miles that we had accumulated through various travel hacking strategies we used the past year or so.

The total cost per person for each of us was just $81.32. These costs are primarily customs and airport tax fees. St. Martin charges a departure tax of $36 a person, as well as ~$16 of additional taxes/fees per person. We paid nothing at all to the airline itself, just taxes and fees that airports require.

Because we had the United MileagePlus Explorer Card we were able to check our bags free. This saved us approximately $100 in fees.

I wrote a detailed post about how to get a free international flight on United Airlines if you want to see exactly how I did it. If you are interested in more general travel hacking tips I would recommend reading the top travel rewards credit cards for 2017 and the 7 keys to successful travel hacking.

Depending on when you go and what amenities you are looking for, St. Martin can be incredibly affordable from a hotel perspective. Our hotel came out to just over $100 a night. If that rate doesn’t shock you, the fact that we essentially had a full kitchen in our room(!) should.

As I mentioned earlier we stayed at Simpson Bay Resort. There were other hotels in the same price range, but the number of pools, location on the beach, and big kitchen in our unit convinced me this was the best place to stay. We booked on hotels.com, but we saved money by using a hotels.com discount code from our Discover card. There are typically discount codes for hotels.com on Ebates as well.

There are always alternatives like airbnb and VRBO. I looked into airbnb prior to booking our hotel, but the price was similar or more than the resort we booked, so we passed. Overall I was really happy with all the amenities that came with our resort and would book a hotel if I went back, but there are others I know who have been to St. Martin who really enjoyed their airbnb rentals.

Considering the fact we had a kitchen in our room and the fact we are pretty frugal when it comes to food, you probably aren’t surprised that we saved money by cooking a lot of our own meals. If you can book a room with a kitchen or rent an airbnb with a kitchen, it’s a big opportunity to save.

There are no major grocery chains on St. Martin. In fact, there isn’t even a Starbucks on the island. With that being said, there are a number of grocery stores you can stock up at. The grocery store we went to near Simpson Bay had a ton of alcohol options as well, which is another way to save money – make your own drinks!

Your vacation should be about priorities. If you really don’t like the idea of cooking your food or making your own meals, you should prioritize restaurant spending and try to save money elsewhere.

 
____________________________

A trip to St. Martin is what you make of it. If you want to spend more money on the trip, you can. If you want to take day trips and experience all that Grand Case’s restaurant row has to offer, you can. Heck, you can even go to an all-inclusive.

But if you want to go to St. Martin and make the trip as affordable as possible, it’s not impossible. This trip very well could end up being one of the cheapest we take, especially considering we were there for 8 nights.

 
 
Have you traveled to St. Martin or would you consider traveling there? What is your favorite place you’ve traveled to?
 
 

Check out some of our favorite personal finance resources:

Are you getting the best credit card rewards? Check out the top cash back credit card offers (updated daily)

Make extra money: 15 ways to make money from your computer

• Get our FREE Automated Budget Spreadsheet and our Student Loan Spreadsheet

Get the First Chapter Free!

Join our online community and get the first chapter of the book Student Loan Solution absolutely FREE!

Send my free chapter