St Maarten — The Island With Too Many Spellings
Sint Maarten, Saint Martin, St. Marteen — the island has many names and even more misspellings. Its neighbor Anguilla accidentally struck gold with two letters. Sint Maarten was not so lucky.
If a tiny speck of land with only 37 square miles has two different names — because it is administered by two countries — matters get complicated. There are two official ways to spell the name of our island: Sint Maarten and Saint Martin. But there are also popular misspellings: Air France has been sending passengers to St. Marteen for decades, and airlines from the US often prefer Saint Maarten. Other popular misspellings include St. Martens, Saint Martan, and St. Maarteen.
Frequent visitors to SXM — our airport code — know how to spell the island's name correctly and search for online information with ease. But travelers planning their first visit might get confused with the spelling of the Dutch side. Our website logs show genuinely creative attempts to travel to St Maartin and St Marrten.
Here at St-Maarten.com, we follow the Dutch convention for our website name — but on the island itself, the Dutch side is written without a hyphen: St Maarten. The French, for their part, have always known exactly how to spell their side: St-Martin.
Residents on the island long ago grew tired of the name conundrum and settled the matter simply: SXM.
SXM and SFG — Two Airports, Two Experiences
SXM is the IATA airport code for Princess Juliana International Airport on the Dutch side — and the shorthand that every resident, frequent visitor, and airline uses for the island regardless of which side they mean. It appears on luggage tags, in social media hashtags (#SXM), and in conversations between people who gave up explaining the spelling to friends back home years ago.
What fewer visitors know is that the island has a second airport. Grand Case L'Espérance Airport on the French side carries the code SFG. It is a different experience entirely — a smaller terminal, shorter queues, no runway drama, and immediate access to Grand Case, Marigot, and the quieter French-side beaches. Air Caraïbes and Saint Barth Commuter operate from SFG, with connections to Guadeloupe, Martinique, and other French Caribbean islands, as well as direct flights to Paris with Air Caraïbes. For visitors staying on the French side, flying into SFG rather than SXM is worth investigating seriously. The immigration queue alone makes it worthwhile.
The French side has its own shorthand as well. The postal code 97150 — the code for Saint-Martin as a French Collectivité — functions as an identifier in its own right among residents and businesses. A free newspaper distributed across the island took the postal code as its name precisely because locals understand immediately what territory it refers to. Visitors staying on the French side will encounter 97150 on addresses, in local references, and on publications available at hotels and restaurants across Saint-Martin.
The Domain Lottery — .ai and .sx
When the internet was young, countries were assigned two-letter domain extensions based on their ISO country codes. Most of these extensions became useful identifiers for national websites and nothing more. A few became something considerably more valuable.
Anguilla, Sint Maarten's neighbor five miles to the north, was assigned .ai. For most of the internet's history that meant nothing. Then artificial intelligence became the dominant technology story of the decade, and every company building in that space wanted a .ai domain to signal their positioning. As of January 2026, over one million .ai domains had been registered — a tenfold increase from pre-boom levels of around 50,000 in 2020.
The financial consequences for Anguilla have been remarkable. The territory earned around $38 million from .ai domain sales in 2024, representing almost a quarter of its total government revenue for the year. By 2025, revenues soared to $85.3 million — 47% of the national budget. Individual domains have sold for extraordinary sums: Dharmesh Shah, the cofounder and CTO of HubSpot, paid $700,000 for you.ai. cloud.ai sold for $600,000. law.ai for $350,000.
Prime Minister Ellis Webster has noted that it was pure coincidence that Anguilla — and not the neighboring island of Antigua — received the .ai extension in 1995. "You can't predict how long this will last," he said. For now, it is transforming a small Caribbean island's public finances in ways that no economic plan could have anticipated.
Sint Maarten's country code domain is .sx. It is harder to remember, easier to mistype, and carries unintended associations for anyone encountering it cold. The island's shipping sector has not helped matters: safe.sx, which a reasonable person might read as something else entirely, is the website of a local shipping company operating in complete innocence of the ambiguity.
Sint Maarten did not win the domain lottery. Anguilla did. Both islands are five miles apart and were assigned their codes in the same era by the same process. That is the Caribbean for you.
Not every Caribbean island drew the short straw on codes. Barbuda's Codrington Airport carries the IATA code BBQ — which says everything you need to know about the Caribbean's relationship with formality.
