If you’re going to St. Thomas… LISTEN UP! They DO NOT use addresses in the USVI. Do you have the address of your airbnb and you looked it up on Google maps? Useless. It WILL NOT help you there. You need landmark directions.

Let me run you through a very real situation that could easily happen to you if you don’t fully accept that they don’t use addresses. I was at the airport late at night after flying home for a friends wedding waiting for a taxi to take me back to campus. There was a very sweet couple that had the address to their airbnb and they also wanted to get a taxi. They had their airbnb pulled up on the maps app and NO ONE would take them. They were planning on renting a car, but the rental car place was closed. Their airbnb host wasn’t answering their phone and they were literally stranded at the airport because addresses on Google maps aren’t accurate in the USVI. The taxi drivers knew that they would just be aimlessly driving them around the island because it was dark and they couldn’t pick out the house from the picture and without landmarks the chances that Google maps was correct was very low.

You need directions that sound like this, “go to the old chapel on the hill and it’s a left from the cost u less where the old campus was”. I promise you if you have directions that make no sense to you and just give landmarks, any taxi driver on the island will get you to the right place, but if you have the “correct address” on maps you will have a very hard time getting a taxi driver to take you.

The Google mapping is very inaccurate on the island and because of the 2017 hurricanes a lot of things have changed and either aren’t there anymore or have moved locations when they were rebuilt.

So what does this mean for you? Get landmarks from your airbnb host. They should already have those posted with the address if they are a well established airbnb. If you’re staying at a hotel you should be totally fine because all hotels are their own landmarks.