Business View Caribbean | Feb 2019

military base in the 1940s, to a major Interna- tional air facility that welcomes hundreds of thousands of passengers every year. And we’ve faced a lot of challenges along the way. To clar- ify, SXM Airport is stationed on St. Maarten, a Dutch colony, while the other half of the island, St. Martin, is French – which makes us a unique destination for tourists. The Airport terminal building you see today was a state-of-the-art, $100 million project completed in 2006 to replace its outdated predecessor. In Sept. 2017, with the arrival of Hurricanes Irma and Maria, the terminal was severely damaged, but not enough to keep us down very long. Luckily, the infrastructure of the terminal building was still intact and today, we’re happy to say, we’re get- ting back on track.” BVC: How did you manage to get operational again so quickly? St. Luce-Jack: “Immediately after the storms, our COO, Michel Hyman, and the resilient SXM Airport team, including the Directors, got re- ally creative. Basically, we operated our arriv- als from the FBO, a separate area next to the terminal building, which wasn’t damaged at all. And we operated our departures, on the airside, from makeshift tents. The airlines, the handlers, gave us a hand, and SITA (multi-national IT specialists) actually put the check-in counters under those tents, so customers could board for travel. We were one of the first countries in the area to be operating. It was quite important to get things back up and running. A lot of resi- dents, who evacuated the island right after the AT A GLANCE PRINCESS JULIANA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT (SXM) WHAT: Major international airport and regional Caribbean hub WHERE: Sint Maarten WEBSITE: www.sxmairport.com 60