Getting around STI
Cibao International closes out the Dominican trio alongside Punta Cana and Las Américas — the third-busiest of the country’s international airports, and the one built for Santiago and the Cibao Valley rather than for beach traffic or the capital. In 2025 it carried 2,209,666 passengers, per the Junta de Aviación Civil, and JetBlue alone flew 1,186,959 of them: STI is the only Dominican airport besides Punta Cana where one single carrier crosses a million passengers a year, driven by the New York run that carries the region’s diaspora home. The whole operation still runs through one terminal building, opened in 2002 under the S.A. chartered by Decreto 185-000 — but a first construction phase worth $200 million is rising right beside it, targeting double today’s capacity by mid-2027 alongside a runway stretched to 2,920 metres. Getting away from the terminal is where Santiago shows its own character: the airport’s own taxi service publishes a fixed fare to more than two hundred towns across the whole Cibao region, not just a ride into the city.
