St. Maarten still reviews well, but traffic is becoming a watermark
As the tourist high season picks up, St. Maarten’s roads are becoming as much a talking point as its beaches and restaurants, and not in a good way. On TripAdvisor forums, in cruise message boards and in Instagram reels that circle the globe in seconds, visitors are increasingly describing the island’s traffic as chaotic, stressful, and, at times, trip-altering, even while they praise almost everything else about their stay.
On Instagram, a reel posted in November by travel creator @layclynn shows a cozy bar scene in Simpson Bay with the caption, “Found the best spot to wait out the daily traffic jam in St Maarten,” tagged with #sxm, #stmaarten and #travel. The post has attracted likes and engagement and is tied to a location page and repeating audio, which means the same line shows up on multiple reels and posts, all reinforcing the idea that gridlock is now part of the “authentic” St. Maarten experience. The tone is playful, but the message is clear: afternoon road jams are a daily expectation rather than an exception.
TripAdvisor users, who still shape a large part of the island’s online reputation, tell similar stories. In a 2025 “St Martin Trip Report,” a returning visitor describes staying in Grand Case and says that walking along the main road felt like “playing human Frogger,” with heavy car traffic, little space for pedestrians, and vehicles parked at odd angles jutting into the lane. They note that they quickly learned to walk along the beach instead of the road to feel safe.
Another TripAdvisor thread, “Local Transportation,”, recounts a day when, as one visitor put it, “all the vehicles in St. Maarten were on the road,” describing chaos when the Simpson Bay bridge opened and reporting that traffic toward Maho was backed up all the way to the “Traffic Man” roundabout. These are not isolated rants, they are part of a consistent pattern of visitor feedback from the last two seasons.
Even when travelers are not outright complaining, they are quietly warning each other that traffic is something to plan around. Another forum user asking about getting around without a car is told bluntly that St. Maarten has “real traffic with real cars driven by lost tourists and busy locals,” and that road conditions are a serious factor in deciding how to move around the island. In other threads, visitors planning beach-hopping or timing their return to the cruise pier ask the same question in different words: “Are we cutting it too close, we’ve heard St. Maarten traffic is bad, we don’t want to miss the ship.”
What makes this more striking is that the general sentiment about St. Maarten online remains very positive. TripAdvisor’s main St. Maarten page lists more than 177,000 traveler reviews, with most top-ranked attractions and tours earning four and five stars. The island was previously celebrated in TripAdvisor’s Travelers’ Choice rankings as one of the top Caribbean destinations, a status built on strong visitor satisfaction with beaches, food, nightlife and friendliness.
Scroll through the forums and you see people raving about Grand Case dining, Orient and Mullet Bay, day sails, and sunset cruises. Yet woven through those glowing reports, almost like a watermark, is the constant caution about traffic: leave extra time, avoid certain roads at certain hours, brace yourself for long backups around the bridge and into Philipsburg when cruise calls and work traffic collide.
The digital reach of those comments matters. TripAdvisor is still one of the first places many travelers consult when they type “St. Maarten” into a search bar, and its Sint Maarten section aggregates hundreds of thousands of reviews and forum posts that remain searchable for years.
A single busy forum thread on traffic can be read by hundreds or thousands of potential visitors who are in the planning phase, trying to decide how many days to spend on island, whether to rent a car, or whether to book that afternoon beach tour that cuts it close to sail-away time. On social media, even a lighthearted reel about “waiting out the daily traffic jam” gets stitched, shared, and re-tagged, feeding the algorithm with an association between St. Maarten and congestion that sits alongside the usual images of planes over Maho and cocktails on Great Bay.
For a tourism-dependent country, this kind of repeated messaging becomes part of the product. Visitors expect some congestion on any popular island, but when the dominant negative theme in online chatter is traffic, and when that theme is tied directly to fears of missing a cruise ship or being stuck instead of relaxing, the risk is that some travelers quietly choose a different destination where movement feels easier. Even those who still come may change their behavior, spending less time in certain districts, skipping an evening in Simpson Bay or a late visit to Philipsburg because they do not want to be trapped in a line of cars.
In previous high seasons, snail-pace traffic around Simpson Bay and Maho has forced the police to step in to protect the cruise product. Police escorts were used to move tour buses carrying cruise passengers through barely moving traffic so they could make it back to Port St. Maarten before departure. That kind of visual, police cars guiding lines of buses through gridlock between the airport side and Pointe Blanche, sticks in the minds of both locals and visitors and circulates online through photos and news links.
Taken together, the picture that emerges from tourist opinions is not of an island that has lost its appeal, but of one that is straining under its own success and infrastructure limits. People still love St. Maarten’s beaches, food, and energy, they are still giving four- and five-star ratings to hotels, tours and restaurants, yet they consistently advise each other to pad schedules, rethink routes, and mentally prepare for jams that feel out of proportion to the island’s size. For a government and private sector that depend on tourism, especially cruise and high-spend stayover visitors, those online remarks are an early warning system.
The Region:
Across the region, other Caribbean destinations have had to confront similar high season congestion and have tried a mix of public transport, traffic engineering, and visitor management. In Puerto Rico, San Juan relies on systems like the Tren Urbano metro and the free Old San Juan trolley to move people into the historic center without everyone bringing a car, and shared airport shuttles are promoted as a way to get from the airport to major hotel zones and the cruise port while avoiding extra vehicles on the road.
In the Dominican Republic, national tourism information points visitors toward an extensive mix of public buses, taxis, ride hailing services and organized shuttles, while resort areas such as Punta Cana lean heavily on pre booked transfers that are bundled with excursions so tourists are not all renting cars for short holiday stays.
Smaller islands have also experimented with structural fixes to keep traffic flowing in peak months. Aruba responded to years of congestion by putting a moratorium on new licenses for buses, taxis, tour operators and car rentals, and it has since embraced a network of roundabouts instead of traffic lights to reduce bottlenecks on key corridors. This, of course, is similar to St. Maarten with the only difference being the exorbitant amount of public transportation licenses in operation on St. Maarten.
Curacao has been working with international partners on plans that combine a redesigned road network, centralized parking and more walkable and bike friendly streets in Willemstad, while recent mobility studies are being used to design a new public transport system that addresses four daily rush hours and limited transport options for many residents. These examples show that tackling congestion in tourism economies usually involves both better collective transport and conscious limits on how many private vehicles compete for the same narrow roads in high season.
If St. Maarten wants its digital image to match the experience it sells in campaigns, traffic can no longer be treated as a purely local annoyance. The posts on TripAdvisor and Instagram show that congestion has become part of the visitor narrative, influencing how people move, how safe they feel on the roads, and how confidently they book excursions that showcase the island. Addressing it is not just about easing commutes for residents, it is about protecting the island’s reputation in the very online spaces where future visitors are deciding whether to come, how long to stay, and how freely they can explore once they get here.