The VIP nut is hard to crack

Minister Grisha Heyliger-Marten is right on the basic principle: if you are transporting passengers for money, calling the service VIP, executive, private or luxury does not somehow place it outside the law. But establishing that principle is the easy part. The real difficulty is deciding how St. Maarten intends to enforce it in a market that has already become far more fluid, digital and informal than the traditional transportation system was designed to handle.

Consider the reality at PJIA. A visitor lands, walks outside and meets someone in a clean minivan. The ride may have been booked online days before arrival, through a website, a villa, a concierge, social media or a private referral. To anyone watching, that driver could just as easily be a friend collecting a friend. There is no obvious sign, no simple visual test, that tells airport security whether a commercial transaction has taken place.

That raises the most practical question of all: how is airport security supposed to know, and should it even be expected to police this? PJIA security has an airport to secure. Port St. Maarten has a port to operate. Neither can realistically be expected to know who every visitor arranged to meet before arriving on the island, nor should either become the frontline enforcement arm for a transportation problem Government itself has to solve.

Confrontation cannot become the default answer either. Imagine security approaching someone suspected of operating illegally, the driver denying it, the guest insisting that this is the person they booked, and the situation escalating in front of arriving tourists. That is not an enforcement strategy. It is a tourism headache waiting to happen.

The larger reality is that private car services are already part of modern travel. Visitors increasingly arrange accommodation, restaurants, excursions and transportation before they arrive. They want to know who is picking them up, what vehicle is coming, what the cost will be and whether previous customers recommend the service. Convenience, certainty and personalization are now part of the travel experience, and transportation is no exception.

That market is not going away. Government can regulate it, and it should. Operators should be licensed, insured and accountable, and standards should apply across the board. That becomes even more important when poor service from an unregulated driver can quickly end up in an influencer video, a viral post or a damaging online review that reflects not just on the individual operator, but on St. Maarten’s tourism product.

Traffic adds another layer to the problem. A taxi driver who spends two hours crawling through congestion may manage only a few worthwhile jobs in a day. At the same time, someone with a minivan who secures a well-paying airport transfer, villa pickup or private day tour can earn considerably more from a single booking. None of that makes unlicensed transport legal, but it does help explain why the market continues to grow and why more people are tempted to enter it.

Then there are hotels, villas and other businesses that already provide transportation as part of their service. If Government intends to tighten control over hotel shuttles, villa transfers and private transportation arrangements, it will eventually have to explain what compliance actually looks like. Will businesses need an additional endorsement on their operational license? A separate transportation permit? A new category entirely? Those are not small details. They determine whether regulation becomes workable or simply creates another layer of confusion.

What should be clear is that simply telling the airport or harbor to stop illegal VIP transportation will not solve the problem. Government has to build a system in which authorized operators are easily identifiable, legitimate businesses can comply without unnecessary bureaucracy, and enforcement officers have a realistic way to establish when someone is operating commercially without permission.

The Minister at least appears to recognize that the grey area cannot continue indefinitely. That is important, because the VIP transportation issue is difficult precisely because the market has already moved ahead of the regulation.

And that may be the biggest point of all.

Regulation can shape this market. It can slow it, structure it and impose standards on it. But if regulation is designed mainly to protect an old system instead of adapting to how visitors now travel, it will only postpone the inevitable.

Private car services are already here.

The real challenge is not whether St. Maarten can stop them, but whether it can regulate them intelligently.

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