Thanks for the pics. Glad you were able to enjoy the end of your trip at Orient Beach Hotel. Glad you didn't have to deal with the early closing times on the French side also, in addition to the water situation.
MOST people have no troubles, yes. But I got a PM Friday night from someone who was due to fly out Saturday morning, hadn't gotten their approval, and couldn't get through to anyone to try to help them. Don't know if they ever got the approval or not.
We had the PCRT (if that’s right). Once we submitted the St. Martin form we were approved in about 30 minutes.
I think the bugs have been worked out. We followed all of the pointers from your forum. One form at a time and we used my email for mine and my wife’s email for the second.
We did it back in November 2020 when it was fairly new and felt comfortable with the process. At the time, we actually did 2 covid tests just to feel we had all bases covered. It was a great vacation and now we have 2 scheduled for this year.
Carol, We just returned last Saturday. I'll do a more full report later, but I just wanted to let you know about testing. We did the Walgreens rapid diagnostic and got EHAS approval within 30 minutes. The stress came at Delta check-in where the attendant did not want to accept the Walgreen test because it stated that it is a NAAT test. I guess she wasn't familiar with the terminology. Anyway, after about 15 mins of staring at the test and then looking over the EHAS docs she decided that it was ok. I also heard a Delta attendant bristle at the term on the EHAS approval form "Pre-authorization," she argued that it should read "Authorization." Just a lot of misinformation or no information on the part of Delta.
We got a return test done at mediwork for $70.00 each. We decided the convenience of an early appointment was worth it. It took less that 15 minutes for both of us and we got results very quickly, we had just finished ordering breakfast at Zee Best when we got the results in email. We scheduled our appointment on Wednesday morning for a Saturday afternoon departure according to the CDC timeline--within 3 calendar days before the day of departure. This worked out but there was a little conversation at return check-in because the timing didn't fit a 72 hour window, at first delta didn't want to accept it, but the CDC says nothing about 72 hours so we we're approved. I suggest booking the mediwork test online even before you leave the US, just plan on taking it a day or two before departure date for not hassle at the airport.
bluejacket--thanks for the info. Looking forward to hearing about the good parts of the trip! Hopefully pretty soon we won't have to go through all these hoops, going and coming!!
FYI, EHAS are sticklers about not accepting oral swabs, even though it's still considered a PCR-RT test, and some claim even more accurate than nasal. For our recent trip, my oral swab test was eventually accepted after several resubmittals of application, my wife's was not....luckily here in houston it's easy to find places that will do the testing for free, with pretty quick turn-arounds, so we both got tested again, nasal swab this time, and she was then quickly approved
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