Redefining the Ride: How the Gumbs twins modernized St. Maarten’s taxi industry

GREAT BAY--Two sisters, both long-time taxi drivers, recognized a gap in St. Maarten’s transport system. With consecutive plate numbers, 329 and 330, they spent years witnessing the frustrations of residents and tourists who still relied on guesswork, price disputes, and word-of-mouth to get a ride. Lissa “Big Twin” Gumbs and her twin, Liesje, chose to tackle the issue head-on by building a local solution. Their answer was SXM Taxi, a digital platform designed in and for St. Maarten, created to give structure to the island’s transportation sector while keeping taxi drivers at the heart of the service.

The sisters’ credibility comes from lived experience rather than boardroom theory. Lissa, a member of the Dutch St. Maarten Taxi Association, has been behind the wheel since her early twenties. Together, the twins logged countless hours in airport queues, hotel pickups, and late-night calls. That practical knowledge shaped their conviction that a well-built app could resolve the inefficiencies of price confusion, long waits, and idle drivers. Their project didn’t begin in a tech lab but in the daily grind of the taxi line.

Unlike Uber or Lyft, SXM Taxi is rooted in the existing legal fare structure of the island. The app uses digital geofencing to reflect official Dutch and French side zone pricing. Drivers collect the full base fare, while passengers see a transparent 15 percent service fee plus a small processing charge before confirming a trip. The system honors established surcharges for late-night rides and luggage, blending modernization with familiar rules. Rather than replacing the local model, the app digitizes it.

Security and accountability are built into the system. Riders and drivers must be verified, every journey is tracked in real time, and a one-time passcode is exchanged at pickup to confirm the match. Detailed receipts are sent to both parties, offering drivers a record of income and riders a safeguard against disputes. On a small island where personal trust is essential, such features amount to a new layer of reliability.

The company is registered under Blackwell Holdings B.V. in St. Maarten and operates with the appropriate local licensing. Its listing by the St. Maarten Tourist Bureau alongside other visitor services reinforces its legitimacy. The SXM Taxi rider and driver apps are available on both Apple and Google platforms, with frequent updates .

A central philosophy of SXM Taxi is to remain driver-first. There is no commission skimmed from driver earnings; instead, the small service fee is carried by the rider. To support the local community, the team introduced a permanent discount for island residents, first at 50 percent and later adjusted to 25 percent. The initiative not only makes transportation more affordable for workers, students, and families, it also helps reduce reliance on unlicensed “gypsy” drivers. The sisters have also put forward proposals to taxi associations, suggesting that app or kiosk bookings at ports could generate automatic contributions for the associations without cutting into driver income.

Growth has been steady but meaningful. In its first week after launch in late 2024, SXM Taxi recorded more than 180 driver signups and over 1,200 rider registrations. By August 2025, the platform had logged 3,365 completed rides, onboarded 272 licensed drivers, and reached more than 12,500 riders. For a country of fewer than 40,000 residents, those figures underscore how quickly demand for reliable, tech-driven transport has taken root.

The data collected offers a secondary benefit: insight. Each ride produces information on wait times, travel patterns, and peak hours, metrics that St. Maarten has rarely captured before. Shared in aggregate, this information could inform traffic planning, cruise ship day coordination, and even public safety initiatives. The sisters have proposed giving government access to anonymized dashboards, showing how the platform could support policymaking as well as mobility.

SXM Taxi is neither the Wild West of ridesharing nor a government-run utility. It is a third option, locally built, regulated by existing fare systems, processed through local banks, and designed for the realities of a small island. Tourists are directed by the Tourist Bureau to use verified, marked taxis, and SXM Taxi provides just that, wrapped in modern convenience.

Looking ahead, the team is preparing new features: a luxury tier with vetted vehicles for VIP and corporate clients, a shuttle system for hotels and schools to reduce congestion, and a ride-share option that lets passengers split costs if traveling in the same direction. These updates are evolutionary, not disruptive, steps meant to make transportation more efficient without displacing existing players.

At its core, the SXM Taxi story is about two sisters who turned their everyday challenges as drivers into a platform for change. They navigated licensing, banking hurdles, and skepticism while keeping faith with the drivers who trained and inspired them. They did not import a global model but crafted a local solution. SXM Taxi is their way of keeping St. Maarten moving—one verified, traceable ride at a time.

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