Sint Maarten’s ED card is free. The official portal is entry.sx, it takes about five minutes to complete, and it charges nothing — not a processing fee, not a convenience charge, not a security verification deposit. Nothing. The Government of Sint Maarten and tourism officials have issued a public advisory warning that scam sites are charging up to $139.99 per person for the same form. Some of those sites appear as sponsored search results above the actual government portal when you search for the form.

The ED card — Embarkation/Disembarkation card — is required for every person arriving in Sint Maarten, whether by air or sea. That includes cruise passengers, and Sint Maarten is one of the busiest cruise ports in the Caribbean, logging nearly 1.6 million cruise passengers in 2025. The scam operates at scale because the audience is enormous, the form name sounds vague enough that paying for “processing” seems plausible, and travelers only discover the problem when they’re at the airport or a fake confirmation gets rejected.

Quick Facts — Sint Maarten ED Card 2026

Detail	Info
Who needs it	All arrivals by air or sea, including cruise passengers
Americans	Visa-free; ED card still required
Submission window	Within 72 hours before scheduled arrival
Cost	Free
Official portal	entry.sx
Processing time	~5 minutes
Scam site charges	$80–$139.99 per person
Government advisory	Issued early 2026 by Government of Sint Maarten and tourism officials
Sponsored search results	Yes — scam sites appear above entry.sx in paid ad positions
Does this replace a visa?	No — ED card is a separate pre-arrival requirement

In one sentence: Sint Maarten’s ED card is a free, mandatory pre-arrival registration completed at entry.sx — any site that charges a fee for it is not the Sint Maarten government.

What Is the Sint Maarten ED Card?

The ED card is Sint Maarten’s digital Embarkation/Disembarkation form, the electronic version of the paper card passengers used to fill out before clearing immigration. It collects your passport details, flight or vessel information, and contact address in Sint Maarten. The portal generates a confirmation that immigration officers and airlines reference when processing your arrival.

Sint Maarten (the Dutch side of the island of Saint Martin) sits at the top of Caribbean cruise traffic. Princess Juliana International Airport, famous for planes landing feet above the beach at Maho, is one of the more photographed approaches in the world. But the island isn’t just a visual spectacle. It draws significant air arrivals alongside the cruise volume, which is why the ED card matters for both categories.

The form launched as a permanent requirement to modernize border data collection and pre-screen arrivals before they board, rather than at the immigration counter after they land. The same logic runs through every mandatory digital arrival card in this series: move data collection earlier, put airlines in the compliance chain, give authorities information before it’s too late to act on it.

Who Needs One (Including Cruise Passengers)

Everyone arriving in Sint Maarten. Air, sea, cruise ships — all of it. This is the detail that catches people.

If you’re on a cruise that stops in Philipsburg, you need an ED card. Many cruise passengers assume port stops in a visa-free destination require no paperwork. Sint Maarten’s ED card requirement covers sea arrivals explicitly. With nearly 1.6 million cruise passengers in 2025 alone, and Q1 2026 cruise arrivals already up 18% over Q1 2025 according to Government of Sint Maarten data, that’s a very large pool of travelers who need to complete a five-minute form and may not realize it.

The rule: every person on a foreign passport, arriving by any route, submits an ED card before arrival. No age-based exemptions are published. Families traveling with children each submit separately.

Americans are visa-free in Sint Maarten — no advance appointment, no special application. The ED card exists entirely outside that arrangement. Not needing a visa doesn’t mean no pre-arrival form.

The Scam Sites

How does a free government form become a $139.99 transaction?

Scammers build sites that mirror the visual language of the official entry.sx portal — same color palette, same government-style layout, similar terminology. They register domains that incorporate plausible-sounding combinations of “Sint Maarten,” “entry,” “ED card,” “arrival,” or “immigration.” Some of those sites buy Google ad placements and appear as sponsored results above entry.sx when you search “Sint Maarten ED card” or “Sint Maarten entry form.” You click what looks like the official link. The form looks right. You complete it. Then a payment screen appears — “processing fee,” “government handling charge,” “convenience fee” — somewhere between $80 and $139.99.

At that point, some travelers pay because they’ve already invested the time and the trip is in two days. Others catch the tell and close the tab.

The Government of Sint Maarten and tourism officials flagged this publicly in early 2026, warning that unofficial sites were charging up to $139.99 for the free form, per reporting by Travel Market Report and TravelPulse. Officials explicitly warned about sponsored search results as one of the primary discovery vectors — the scam sites weren’t just ranking organically, they were paying to appear first.

The identity theft angle compounds the financial one. The ED card form requires your full name, passport number, date of birth, and travel dates. A fraudulent site collecting that information isn’t just charging $140 for a form — it’s acquiring the data needed for identity theft or passport fraud. The Travel and Travel and Tour World both noted the data exposure risk as distinct from the direct financial loss.

The tell is the same one that applies across every fraudulent arrival-card operation — the domain. Sint Maarten’s official government digital services use the .sx country code domain. The entry portal is entry.sx. If a URL doesn’t end in .sx, or isn’t directly linked from the official government or tourism sites, it’s not the Sint Maarten government. Regardless of how it looks, what it charges, or how high it ranks.

How Do I Actually Complete the Sint Maarten ED Card?

How to complete the ED card in 5 minutes

Go to entry.sx. Type the URL directly — don’t trust a search result to get you there, since sponsored scam sites appear above the official portal. The form is free at every step. If a payment screen appears at any point, close the tab and start over at entry.sx typed directly into your browser.

1. Go to entry.sx directly. Verify the URL. It must be entry.sx — the official Sint Maarten government portal. No payment screen will appear at any step.

2. Enter your passport details. Full name exactly as it appears on your passport, passport number, nationality, date of birth, expiry date. Discrepancies between the ED card and your travel document cause delays at immigration.

3. Enter your travel information. For air arrivals: airline, flight number, departure date and time, departure airport. For sea or cruise arrivals: vessel name, arrival date, and port.

4. Enter your contact details in Sint Maarten. Hotel name and address, or wherever you’re staying. For cruise passengers who are not overnighting, check the form’s current instructions for day visitors — requirements can vary and are worth confirming ahead of travel.

5. Complete any additional declarations requested. The form collects basic health and trip information.

6. Submit. No payment. The portal generates a confirmation. Email it to yourself and screenshot it. This is what immigration and your airline will ask for.

The 72-hour window: submit within three days before your scheduled arrival. For cruise passengers, that’s three days before your ship docks in Philipsburg. For flights into Princess Juliana, three days before your flight lands.

$139.99 Is the Top of This Scam Class

Putting the Sint Maarten number in context: this is the highest documented per-person charge across the arrival-card scam series.

The Philippines’ eTravel system has scam sites charging up to $100. Thailand’s TDAC saw scam operations charging up to $90, with Thai Immigration estimating as much as $100 million total harm from 10% of foreign arrivals hitting fraudulent portals. Colombia’s Check-MIG has documented charges up to $70. Malaysia’s MDAC and Singapore’s SGAC have drawn their own fake-portal ecosystems.

At $139.99, the Sint Maarten scam is operating at the top of this price range. Part of that is probably calibrated to what Caribbean travelers expect to spend — Sint Maarten draws a higher-end demographic than some Southeast Asian destinations, and scam pricing often reflects assumptions about the target audience’s willingness to absorb a “processing fee” without questioning it.

The structural problem is that Sint Maarten is a smaller country with fewer digital resources to dominate search results for its own immigration forms. A government with limited web infrastructure competing against scam operations with paid search budgets is a mismatch. Entry.sx is the correct site. It doesn’t always win the search results page.

Sint Maarten in the 2026 Pre-Arrival Picture

The trend across 2025 and 2026 has been consistent: mandatory pre-departure digital registration, airlines handling the first compliance checkpoint, data collected before boarding. Vietnam’s digital arrival card launched April 2026. Singapore enforced carrier liability for its SGAC from January 30, 2026. The EU’s ETIAS is still in the pipeline for later in 2026.

What makes Sint Maarten different from those destinations is the cruise volume. Thailand processes 35 million annual visitors. Sint Maarten processes far fewer — but a significant portion arrive by cruise ship, and many cruise passengers don’t think of a port stop as requiring pre-arrival documentation. The combination of a large, often uninformed cruise audience and scam sites appearing as sponsored results is exactly how $139.99 charges accumulate without broader awareness.

If you’re doing a Caribbean itinerary with multiple stops — Sint Maarten, St. Barts, Antigua, Barbados — check each destination’s entry requirements separately. The Sint Maarten ED card covers Dutch Sint Maarten specifically. The French side of the island (Saint-Martin) is a separate territory with different entry rules. Nearby islands have their own requirements.

The Bottom Line

Sint Maarten’s ED card is required for all arrivals by air or sea, including cruise passengers. It’s free. The only place to submit it is entry.sx. Any site charging for this form — up to $139.99, appearing as sponsored search results, mimicking official government design — is not the Sint Maarten government.

The Government of Sint Maarten issued a public advisory in early 2026 confirming there are no fees associated with the ED form. If you’ve already paid a third-party site, contact your bank or card provider immediately about a chargeback.

Type entry.sx directly. Five minutes. No payment screen. That’s the whole process.

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ED card official portal: entry.sx. Sint Maarten Government cruise arrivals data: sintmaartengov.org. Scam advisory coverage: Travel Market Report, TravelPulse, Travel and Tour World. Information current as of May 2026 — verify requirements with the Sint Maarten government before travel.