Is It Worth It?

Our cruise is offering a shore excursion from St. Martin to St. Barths for $86. You get to spend about four hours on your own. We were planning to take it, but after reading some of the posts here I am having second thoughts. There will be two cruise ships in St. Barths that day. Is it worth it to visit, or should we stick to St. Martin? It would be our first visit to either island.

I've been to St. Maarten twice, and the first time I took an amazing, all day tour with Noel Tours, so I feel like I saw that island pretty well (and loved it) - if you have never been to either, I would start with St. Maarten. It's only because I've already been that I'm going to St. Barts on my upcoming cruise, and our shore excursion is a pretty whirlwind four hours as well. I get the feeling I'll be window shopping and then having a drink at a beachside cafe, but my bucketlist is to visit every Caribbean island so gotta do it!

I was just on St. Barths a few days ago, taking the ferry from St. Maarten on a cruiseline (MSC) excursion.  After reading the comments from some posters on CC, I was a bit concerned but we experienced nothing of the issues of which people wrote.  We've been to St. Maarten multiple times so the trip to St. Barths was a logical extension.  I do agree with DaMom that, if you have never been to St. Maarten, you might be better off seeing that island first than going through the 45-minute ferry ride to St. Barths.  With that said, however, we managed to do both. Our ship was in port from 7 am until 7 pm so we had plenty of time.  The cruiseline had arranged for a private ferry charter and we arrived in St. Barths about 9:45 am.  We caught the ferry back to St. Maarten at about 2:15 pm and were on the beach boardwalk in Philipsburg  by 3:15 which left us time to shop, etc.   

St.  Barths is unlike any Caribbean island we've been on.  Gustavia is very clean and quaint...at least what we saw of it.  We had nothing booked and a group of us who met on the ferry simply walked to the taxi stand near the ferry terminal where numerous cabs were waiting. A driver who was very nice and spoke good English  took us on an excellent 2-hour tour of the island for $20 (USD) each.  The reason for the low price was because we had 8 people taking the tour.  Otherwise, it would have been more per person.   We went up and down the steep roads, stopped at several points for photo ops, and learned about life on St Barths from our driver. 

It's a beautiful island.   Pretty clear that it's a wealthy island and we wondered what the less fortunate people do and where they might live.  Very clean, no one approaching us to sell trinkets or braid hair, and no junk laying in front yards as we've seen on several other islands.  Everyone we met in the shops was very nice to us and spoke English.  We were, of course, careful to ask them first if they spoke English rather to assume they did and explained that we did not speak French.   Gustavia surrounds a beautiful harbor filled with yachts and sailboats...one of the nicest harbors we've seen in the Caribbean from a photo standpoint!   The main section has narrow streets lined with high-end stores but we also managed to find a couple of places to get basic souvenirs so there is no need to spend major money unless you want to do that.  We grabbed lunch at a local restaurant  (be aware, that place did not take credit cards but we did use cards in two of the stores so that doesn't seem to be a problem) and just "soaked up" the island atmosphere.  We did agree that, while we really enjoyed our time there, we don't feel a need to get back there any time soon simply because now that we've seen it, there wasn't a lot to do other than see the island and shop.  Still, it was a highly enjoyable day!