TravelTalkOnline Forums Travel and Vacation Forums St. Maarten - St. Martin Entry requirements

Hi Everyone. New to the Forum have been reading for a long time. I apologize for having to revisit the entry requirements. We are traveling to St. Martin next week. We are from the US and fully vaccinated. The EHAS website travel requirements says a rt-PCR test 72 hours before departure. The FAQ section says 120 hours. It looks like this was changed to 72 hours, based on previous posts from the Forum. Is it 72 hours.? If 72 hours will a rapid test be accepted like the one at Walgreens called IDNOW? The EHAS website is not really clear. Thank you.

It is 72 hours for the rtPCR test and 48 hours for the antigen test. Several on this forum have used the IDNow test and it has been accepted. We have an appointment at Walgreens today for the IDNow test and hope to have it submitted for EHAS approval this afternoon. I will post my experience.

ID Now is a rapid PCR and is acceptable within 72 hours. Just did it yesterday for Saturday travel.

We had the ID Now test done yesterday at Walgreens. Results were emailed to us within 40 minutes ! Submitted the EHAS application, with test results and Vaccination card, approved within two hours....we are very happy ! We were anticipating glitches, but everything worked well.

Thank you everyone for your quick responses. We have to make a stop in Puerto Rico for a few days and I was concerned about the timing of getting the results back.

Aruba just started (yesterday) accepting proof of vaccination instead of a neg test,,,,but only for a small specific group of travelers . It's a start in the right direction though

Walgreens is great. Got results in less than 45 minutes. EHAS not so much. Submitted both of ours within minutes of each other. I got approval in 10 minutes. Still waiting on wife's 5 hours later. I emailed them and followed up with a phone call 2 hours later that resulted in a recording telling me to email them. Very frustrating. I would resubmit but you have to pay the $30 on each submission unless you are denied. I used different emails and got the response that they were received. If I don't have something by morning I will resubmit and eat the $30.

I’m pretty sure they have a process for identifying and refunding the duplicates.

They put a temporary hold on your credit card for $30 at the time of application. They only do a charge at the time a pre-approval is sent to the applicant.

I can state that I screwed up and submitted for an approval twice for me, was approved twice for me, but was only charged once for the insurance.

Does anyone know if they review application 24-7? We submitted earlier this evening, received one back with an "approval". There are others in our group trying to submit and we are now getting an error message as if the website is down. Just wondering if they take the application down at some point during the day or so many folks are coming on Saturday, it's crashing.

crsxm, I can't answer your question with any certainty but I was approved in 10 minutes and it took 9 hours for my wife's approval. It was submitted at 12:30pm and we received approval at 9:29pm tonight.

Thanks Jaybird. As much as I told myself not to stress, I stressed. I went to sleep and woke up to approvals for the remaining three that I had input. The approvals came around 10:30 pm. I received an email back from Ehas indicating that those who were having trouble with the website should restart their device. I think those folks were going to wait until morning.
One step closer to paradise--

They sometimes do answer 24/7. You might get your alproval in the middle of the night.

I was told that a lot of them are still working from home, each application gets sent to the next staff member in line, so if yours went to a person who was sitting at their computer, almost immediate approval, your wife's probably went to someone who was out for the afternoon and they did it when they got back. This also helps explain why 2 identical applications can get different results

UKsimonusa--That's how I understand that it works also. That explains why some are immediate and some take a while, and some are approved and some are not. The 'taking different amounts of time' I get, and I understand. The 'some are approved and some are not', when the information is exactly the same, THAT shouldn't happen.