I'll be flying international from San Diego soon and need to buy a couple things that duty free is best for. Yet looking at the SAN website, I can only see one typical duty free shop, which is only open 3 days a week, 2 hour each day.
If anyone flew recently from SAN, can you confirm the situation?
Note: the question is about December 2021.
I flew a couple of days ago and can confirm first hand that the SAN website is generally correct. There really is only one duty free shop (in the typical sense), called Sky Free Shop, in terminal 2. And it normally is open as stated on SAN website: Mon, Fri, Sunday 10:30 am-12:30 pm, closed all other times.
I say generally, because sometimes they may be randomly open at other times, or, as it happened in my case, half of the shop was open on Wednesday afternoon, around 4 pm. There was a single employee in the store. I asked him about the opening hours - to which he replied that they'd normally be closed, but he decided to open for a few hours to make extra sales in pre-christmas season.
As I said, only half the shop was open, selling a lot of perfumes and cosmetics and a very limited selection of alcohol and cigarettes. There was nothing else, not even chocolates, available. So, don't rely on it being there and open.
