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We'd like to avoid the costly Westin Resort transfer fees by renting a car for the week at the airport in St. Thomas and taking it to St. John on the ferry. How difficult will that be? I've been reading in the forum that some rental car companies do not allow their vehicles to be transported to St. John, but assuming that we rent from one that does, are there any other issues we should know about?
Our travel date is June 18.
Thanks!
The only agency which specifically disallows their vehicles to go to STJ is Hertz. Most of the others (I believe Budget is the exception) won't rent you a compact but require you to rent a 4WD to take over there (the agencies on STJ only carry 4WD vehicles in their fleet). Amalie, Discount and Dependable on STT are consistently rated highly by visitors en route to STJ.
Just make sure that your airline arrival and departure times allows you enough time to catch the car barges over to STJ and back to STT. Get to the barges in plenty of time for your departures or you'll wait for the next one and they don't run 24/7.
See the barge schedule: https://www.vinow.com/general_usvi/interisland_ferry/
The majority of my guests use Budget and Dependable Car Rental.
Thanks so much for the answer.
Is there generally a long line for the barges? In other words, could we miss one even if we got there on time because they've run out of room?
It rarely happens and, if one of the barges is down, the operators are particularly conscious of that last ferry's capacity and make sure that nobody is stranded.
Two of the car barges running between STT and STJ are currently out of commission. They are running the operable boats more frequently as a result, but there are still backlogs happening. We arrived early for the 9:30am barge from St. John to St. Thomas last Saturday - while we made it on fine, about 20 or so cars towards the back of the line could not fit on board and had to wait for the next boat to arrive.
I second STT Resident's recommendations for car rental companies. Discount in particular has provided consistently good customer service to us in years past. I've only had one negative experience with a rental company in the last 6 years, and that is L&L Jeep. I would read some online reviews of any company you consider renting from as we had a rather unpleasant experience with L&L's mercurial owner - had we done our due diligence, we would have seen the litany of complaints about him and saved ourselves the headache.
Never heard of them. They must be new? Are you involved in company?
we rented from Discount yesterday. Got a brand new red Jeep. We are the first to rent this one and it looks like most of their jeeps are also new. Very nice people. They have cars as well but don't want them on the ferry. They say that the cars will drag bottom on the ramp to get on and off. This is their website.
My advice: Avoid Discount Car Rental on St Thomas unless you like buying new tires for their vehicles. Ask me how I know.
