About
An honest guide to one small island
This Is SXM is an independent guide to St. Maarten and St. Martin. One island, two countries, and a lot of half-true things written about it online. This site tries to be the version you can trust.
What this is
St. Maarten and St. Martin get a lot of writing that is either a brochure or a bad copy of a brochure. Prices that were true five years ago. Beaches described as calm that are rough half the year. The same twelve sentences, reworded, on forty sites.
This Is SXM is the other thing. It is built to have the depth of an archive, the usefulness of a friend who actually lives the island, and the polish of a product you would happily pay for. It covers the trip you are planning, the day you are already on the ground, and the long story of the place itself.
It is a passionate, rigorous outside curator. It does the reading, checks the facts, and tells you the tradeoffs. It does not claim to be a St. Martiner or to own the island. When the water gets rough or the parking is a nightmare, the page says so.
How it is sourced
Facts get sources. Contested facts get a caveat that says people disagree. Legends get labeled as legends, not passed off as history. When something cannot be pinned down, the page says that too, out loud, instead of guessing and sounding confident.
Every entry carries a date for when it was last checked and a confidence level, so you can see how fresh and how solid it is. Old entries get worked back through on a schedule rather than left to quietly rot. Photos are properly licensed and credited, and the people who made them are named on the image credits page.
The clearest proof of the standard is the one part of the site that is fully built: the history of the island. It is 5,000 years on one page, every claim carried by named sources, with the contested bits flagged as contested. If you want to know how careful the rest of this site intends to be, read that first.
How this actually gets written
Picture a really fast research assistant. That’s the AI. It can read forty years of hurricane records, compare all nine areas on the island, and hand you a first draft of “Should You Stay in Simpson Bay” before you’ve finished your coffee.
What it can’t do is walk the beach. It doesn’t know the taxi stand moved last year, or that the chairs at that one spot are always gone by ten on Sundays. That part still takes a person.
So that’s the deal here. AI drafts a lot of this site, including the comparisons and the data behind tools like the beach finder. Then a real person checks it, usually Leslie, increasingly Angelique, who actually lives on the island and can go look. Fixes what’s wrong. Adds the stuff only someone who’s been there would know.
You can see exactly where any given page stands. Look for the small tag near the bottom. “Verified” means someone confirmed it in person. “Reported” means it’s built from solid sources, listed right there, but nobody’s walked out and checked it yet.
On photos, here’s the line we don’t cross: we don’t invent scenes that never happened. Every photo on this site is a real photograph, either licensed or pulled from a credited archive. In a few clearly marked spots on the history page, we’ve added a speculative color layer to a real black-and-white photograph, so you can get a feel for what a scene might have looked like. It’s always shown next to the untouched original, always labeled as a guess, and never presented as confirmed fact. If we ever actually know the true colors from another source, we say so and use that instead of guessing.
Here’s the part we’d bet you can get behind: a page that started as an AI draft and then got checked by an actual human beats a page a person wrote from memory and never looked at twice. Most travel sites give you the second one and don’t tell you. We’d rather tell you which one you’re getting, every time.
Notice something off? Tell us. That’s the whole mechanism by which “reported” turns into “verified.”
Money never buys our judgment
No one can pay their way into a recommendation, a ranking, or a guide. Not a beach, not a restaurant, not a hotel. Editorial entries are chosen on merit, and that is not a policy we can quietly change our mind about later: it is written into the code that runs the site, as a value that literally cannot be set to true.
If This Is SXM ever carries advertising or featured listings, they will be clearly labeled as paid and kept separate from the editorial content. You will always know what earned its place and what bought it. The two never blur together.
The site does earn money, and it does it in the open. Some links are affiliate links, which means a booking made through them can pay a small commission at no extra cost to you. Those links never buy a recommendation. If a place with an affiliate program and a better place without one are up for the same slot, the better place wins, and the page tells you why. The full rules are on the affiliate disclosure page.
Who is behind it
This Is SXM is built and edited by Leslie Samuel. It is an independent project, not the work of a tourism board or a booking company, and it answers to its readers rather than to any of the businesses it writes about.
Found something that is wrong, out of date, or missing? That is a gift, and corrections are taken seriously. Say hello on the contact page.