St Lucia from California- easiest or fastest route?
 

Hello,
We would like to go to St. Lucia and stay at a resort rather than via a cruise. Any recommendations on getting there from California (northern) as far as routes- easiest and most direct would be appreciated. We would most likely spend a night enroute before making last leg to St. Lucia (we are in 60's and don't want to do red eye flights but also don't want to pay for business class :). Want entire trip to be relaxing and not stressful. Also, since it is so far, any suggestions about one other island to visit from St Lucia easily. Thanks for any suggestions or recommendations.

It just depends on where want to stop over en route and which airport you are closest to. From OAK or SFO you can fly non-stop and stay over at ORD or ATL or EWR or BOS or JFK or MIA or . . .

From SMF - you can fly via Charlotte, or JFK or ATL -- just tons of options

All are close to the same travel time -- within about 2 hours total travel time

Can’t give you specifics but maybe this will help.

Depending on your timing and airline you’ll probably have to take a connecting flight via Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta, Charlotte or Miami and yes, it will most likely require an overnight stop in one of those cities. Go to this website: Matrix - ITA Software by Google

Plug in your home airport of choice, planned dates of travel and intended destination airport (St. Lucia has two international airports). You’ll get a list of just about all available flights and routing.

I believe you can still get to Martinique, Dominica and Guadalupe by ferry from St. Lucia but you may find the ferries don’t run everyday and/or the trip might be quite long because of the distances.

You could fly to Barbados, St. Vincent and several other islands but you my find it will be pricey to fly to those islands. It is not always easy or inexpensive to island hop in the Caribbean.

If you want your trip to be “relaxing and not stressful” you’d be better off confining your trip to St.Lucia, it’s a pretty big island and you’d need several weeks to “see it all”.

There are 2 airports in St Lucia, one is for international flights ie those from the UK, US etc (Hewanorra code UVF) and a smaller airport in the north (Vigie airport now renamed to George FL Charles apparently, code SLU) for flights from other islands in the Caribbean ie. smaller aircraft.

a) Indeed you can fly from Northern California to IAH, DFW etc for a night stopover, but you cannot fly direct from IAH, DFW, CLT or EWR to St Lucia. So I would recommend looking at airports such as Miami, Atlanta, ORD or JFK from where you can take a direct flight to UVF (Hewanorra which is in the south of the island). Look at Jetblue's network, they have some good routes to the Caribbean.
Work backwards, where can you fly to direct from US to St Lucia. Unless of course you don't mind another connection. I've done similar and stayed overnight at MIA to get to Mexico once, it worked quite well but MIA airport was not exactly an unstressful experience.

b) You can easily visit other islands by using the catamaran service Express des Iles, the website used to be available in English but seems to be only in French now. I've taken this service from Guadeloupe to Martinique (arriving in Fort de France by sea is quite spectacular) and it was pretty good, it took 3 hours but from St Lucia, Martinique is much closer, 1.5 hours and around EUR80 one way.

https://www.express-des-iles.fr/

Otherwise you can fly to other islands, check airlines such as LIAT. I don't know what there would be to do in St Lucia for several weeks, I didn't find the island very big with many areas on the north east coast inaccessible, there is trekking, scuba, snorkelling and general lazing on the beach. It does take time to get from north to south and the south is quite hilly and very beautiful. Islands such as Guadeloupe need alot of time to thoroughly explore esp if you include the offshore islands such as Marie Galante etc.

response to replies
 

thanks for all your input!

From Seattle to Jamaica I found a red-eye thru Atlanta to be the easiest and fastest that was available.