SJO San Jose

How deep the SJO board really is

The table above says where a courier can fly from SJO. This reads the same 35 destinations back for the questions a dispatcher asks second: how much of the board rests on one airline, how much of it runs less than daily, whether the return leg is as thick as the outbound, what the clock here does to a Gulf working day and which of the destinations shut at night, all of it computed on 2026-09-07 from AeroDataBox scheduled route statistics.

• 24of the 35 destinations are flown by one airline
• 16destinations run less than once a day
• 3destinations have four or more departures a day
• 25.7%of the destinations name Avianca, the largest presence here

Who holds the departures at SJO

25 airlines appear on the SJO board and they do not hold it evenly. Avianca is on 9 of the 35 destinations, 25.7 per cent of them, and on 4 of those it is the only airline flying the sector. The destinations it appears on carry 32.7 of the 59.9 departures a day this airport files, though other airlines fly some of the same sectors, so read that as reach rather than as a share of the aircraft.

The next largest presence is Volaris Costa Rica on 4 destinations. 15 of the 25 airlines at SJO appear on a single destination each, which is the long tail every airport carries, and none of it is a rebooking option when the sector you need is the one that fell over.

That is a middling concentration at SJO: one airline on 25.7 per cent of the destinations and the other 74.3 per cent spread across 24 airlines. A cancellation inside the Avianca network is often survivable inside the same booking, but on the 26 destinations Avianca does not touch, a rebooking means moving to a carrier the desk has to check for a through fare first.

How much of the SJO board is daily

Of the 35 destinations, 19 are flown at least once a day and 16 are not, 3 of them running once a week or less. The median destination on the SJO board is flown about once a day.

An average of 0.14 flights a day is the schedule statistic, and it is worth translating it before anything is promised to anybody: SJO to Zurich (ZRH) is about one a week, so a missed departure there is not a delay of hours, it is the next slot.

The five busiest destinations carry 27.9 of the 59.9 departures a day, 46.5 per cent of the whole board. The other 30 destinations are spread widely enough that a courier who misses the first departure at SJO usually has somewhere else to look on the same board.

Destination	Country	The only airline on it	Flights a week	km	Routing
Liberia LIR	Costa Rica	Edelweiss Air	1	161	plan this
Nicoya NOB	Costa Rica	World Ticket Ltd	1	158	plan this
Zurich ZRH	Switzerland	Edelweiss Air	1	9,396	plan this
Monterrey MTY	Mexico	VivaAerobus	2	2,426	the pair page
Amsterdam AMS	the Netherlands	KLM	3	9,060	plan this
Charlotte CLT	the United States	American Airlines	3	2,824	plan this
Frankfurt-am-Main FRA	Germany	Lufthansa	3	9,353	plan this
Guadalajara GDL	Mexico	Volaris Costa Rica	3	2,356	the pair page
Guayaquil GYE	Ecuador	Avianca	3	1,434	plan this
Los Angeles LAX	the United States	Alaska Airlines	3	4,382	plan this

The ten destinations out of SJO where one airline holds the sector and files fewer than seven departures a week, with the weekly figure taken as the average daily rate multiplied by seven rather than as a fixed timetable. 4 further destinations sit in the same position and are listed in the board above.

The way back from SJO

The desk holds the return direction for 31 of the 35 destinations, and a courier plans the way back on those figures rather than on the outbound. On two of them the return into SJO runs thinner than the outbound by more than a quarter. The widest gaps are Toronto (YYZ) at 0.86 out a day against 0.57 back and Los Angeles (LAX) at 0.43 out a day against 0.29 back.

It runs the other way as well: Miami (MIA) files 3.1 a day back into SJO against 2.1 outbound, which is the shape that strands a courier at this end rather than at the far end.

The clock at SJO

SJO keeps America/Costa_Rica time, ten hours behind Dubai all year.

When it is 09:00 on a Dubai working morning it is 23:00 at SJO, and a nine to six day at each end does not overlap at all, so an instruction written in Dubai is read here on the following working day unless somebody is woken up.

The night at SJO

4 of the destinations from here carry a documented night restriction of their own, which is a departure time question at this end rather than an arrival problem at the other.

Into Paris (CDG) the door shuts at 00:00 local, so the last departure from SJO that lands inside it leaves around 04:44, on a modelled block of 11h 16m. Into Amsterdam (AMS) the door shuts at 23:00 local, so the last departure from SJO that lands inside it leaves around 03:35, on a modelled block of 11h 25m. Into Frankfurt-am-Main (FRA) the door shuts at 23:00 local, so the last departure from SJO that lands inside it leaves around 03:14, on a modelled block of 11h 46m. Those three departure times out of SJO are worked backwards from the published window with the block time model this site uses everywhere, 720 to 880 km an hour by sector length with thirty minutes on the ground, so they are arithmetic rather than a timetable and the desk checks the published departure before it promises the landing.

Where SJO turns up on the rest of this site

The airport also sits behind the Costa Rica country desk, which sets out the customs practice, the working week and the road legs behind this airport.

The site publishes 4 airport pair pages that start or end at SJO, each with the distance, the block time, the carriers on the sector and a door to door clock. The busiest are San Jose to Mexico City (MEX), San Jose to Bogotá (BOG) and San Jose to Guadalajara (GDL).

Four courier postings name SJO as the airport a courier here flies from: San José, Limón and Liberia.

To price a movement rather than read the board, the route calculator opens with SJO already set as the origin, and it works out the flying time, the distance and the delivery hour for any of the 35 destinations above.