Kim--respectfully, this is a whole NOTHER ball game than the cruises that have left out of SXM before. The largest ships to ever home port in SXM were roughly one QUARTER the size of this ship, at around 500-600 pax. And the ones like Wind Star, which have been home porting in SXM for quite a while, average around 200 pax.

My only concern in the whole deal is air, but they are pricing the cruises with air and thinking about it, they HAVE to be doing charter air, based on the numbers. The ship holds about 2,000, at full capacity. I doubt very much they will be running at full capacity, probably around 3/4, which would be 1500 people. It's likely that at least 10% of those will do their own air, so they could spend a few more days on either end of the cruise on land. That would leave 1350 people all trying to arrive on a Saturday at Juliana. Since your average 737 holds about 169 pax, fully loaded, you are talking approximately NINE 737's extra of people on a Saturday. So, my feeling is that there is no way those people are even going to go inside Juliana, or at least, not in the regular c & i lines. I figure they will be bussed directly from the plane to the cruise port. OR there will be some tents set up outside Juliana to process them in, and then they are bussed from there to the cruise port.

The cruise lines have had nothing much else to plan for the past year, so I think that they will figure these things out, to make the most sense for their passengers. And putting them all through the regular lines at Juliana would make ZERO sense.

Kind of exciting for ME personally is that we will get to see all this kind of up close and personal, from Beachside Villas, come June!!