Where a Vanuatu Passport Takes You

A Vanuatu passport once offered simple, visa-free access across the globe. Today, the story is more complicated. It still provides visa-free or visa-on-arrival entry to 88 countries and territories, but two critical destinations are now off that list: the European Union's Schengen Area and the United Kingdom. Both suspended their visa-waiver agreements in 2023. Before making an investment, you must understand these new, and very real, travel limitations.

Schengen Area - 29 European countries that have done away with passport checks and every other form of control at the borders they share. For a traveller the zone works as one jurisdiction: anyone who is not exempt needs a single Schengen visa to get in.

Citizenship by Investment (CBI) - A route to a second citizenship and passport in return for a substantial financial contribution to a country's economy, granted only after rigorous due diligence and background screening.

The Shifting Landscape: Risk and Exposure for Vanuatu Passport Holders

The primary risk for any holder of a Vanuatu passport is the shrinking map of visa-free access. A passport's value is its mobility. For Vanuatu, two major decisions have seriously damaged that value:

• Schengen Area Suspension: The Council of the European Union fully suspended its visa-waiver agreement for all Vanuatu citizens, a change that took effect on February 4, 2023. The EU cited security concerns with Vanuatu's investor citizenship schemes, using the suspension mechanism in Article 8 of Regulation (EU) 2018/1806.
• United Kingdom Visa Requirement: Echoing the EU's reasoning, the UK government also revoked visa-free access for Vanuatu nationals on July 19, 2023, pointing to weak due diligence in the citizenship programme.

What does this mean for you? A key benefit—spontaneous, frictionless travel to Europe—is gone. Investors who bought a passport based on old marketing now face a new reality. They must apply for standard Schengen or UK visitor visas. That’s a process involving piles of paperwork, visa fees, and uncertain processing times. Trying to travel without the correct visa will get you denied boarding by the airline or turned away at the border. Simple as that.

Comparing Second Passport Options: Vanuatu vs. The Caribbean

For most investors, the choice isn't just about Vanuatu. It's about how Vanuatu stacks up against other leading Citizenship by Investment (CBI) programmes, especially those in the Caribbean. The loss of EU and UK access has fundamentally altered Vanuatu's standing in this competition.

Feature	Vanuatu	Caribbean Programmes (St. Kitts, Grenada, etc.)
Visa-Free Access	88 countries and territories	140-155+ countries and territories
Schengen Area Access	Visa Required (Suspended Feb 2023)	Visa-Free (ETIAS pre-authorisation required)
UK Access	Visa Required (Suspended July 2023)	Visa-Free (Up to 6 months)
Minimum Investment (Single)	US$130,000 (donation)	US$200,000 (donation, as of July 2024 MOA)
Processing Time	2–4 months (industry average)	4–6 months (industry average)
Taxation	No income, capital gains, or inheritance tax	No income, capital gains, or inheritance tax
Key Advantage	Lower cost, faster processing, Asia-Pacific access	Wider visa-free reach, especially to Europe

Takeaway: Caribbean passports simply offer far better global mobility, especially for the UK and Europe. Vanuatu's main draws are its lower price tag and faster timeline. It remains a viable option, but only for individuals whose business and travel are focused on Asia and the Pacific, not Europe.

How to Read a Visa-Free List Without Being Misled

Almost every figure you will see quoted for this passport is either out of date or counting something different. Three distinctions explain the whole spread between 88 and 130.

Visa-free is not visa-on-arrival. A destination where you must queue, pay a fee and satisfy an officer before entry is not the same as one you walk into on the passport alone, yet most published totals bundle them together. The figure of 88 used on this site counts both, which is the standard the Henley ranking applies — so treating it as 88 walk-in destinations would overstate it.

Electronic authorisations are counted inconsistently. Several countries require an approved travel authorisation before boarding. Some lists call that visa-free because no embassy visit is involved; others exclude it. The same passport can therefore be honestly described with two different numbers depending on which convention a site follows.

Most large figures predate 2023. This is the one that matters. Totals of 120 or 130 were accurate while the Schengen Area and the United Kingdom were included. The European Union fully suspended its visa waiver on 4 February 2023 and the United Kingdom added Vanuatu to its visa national list on 19 July 2023. Any list still showing European destinations is describing the world before those dates, and a great many of them still do.

What the loss of Europe actually changes

For travel to Europe itself, it means a Schengen visa application: appointment, documentation, fee and a decision that can go against you. For anyone who acquired this passport specifically for European mobility, the instrument no longer does the job it was bought for.

What it does not change is the rest of the list. Access to Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and Russia, to much of the Caribbean and Pacific, and to a broad set of African and Latin American destinations is unaffected by a European decision. Whether that is useful depends entirely on where you actually travel, which is a more productive question than the total.

Check before you book, not after

Entry requirements are set by each destination and change without notice, sometimes on short warning and occasionally in response to events that have nothing to do with Vanuatu. The list on this page reflects the position when it was written; the authority that will admit you is the destination's own immigration service, and it is the only source worth relying on for a trip you have already paid for.

Destinations Reachable Without a Visa

Below is every destination a Vanuatu passport enters with no visa obtained beforehand, sorted by the way entry is given. The ranking figure of 88 breaks down into 55 visa-free destinations, 26 where the visa is issued at the border, and 7 partially recognised territories shown in their own section. Stay lengths are those published, and each destination decides them.

Visa-free entry

The passport is shown and entry granted. Nothing is filed in advance, nothing paid, no approval sought.

Africa (11)

Destination	Permitted stay
Angola	30 days
Botswana	90 days
Eswatini	30 days
Gambia	90 days
Lesotho	90 days
Mauritius	90 days
Rwanda	30 days
Tanzania	90 days
Uganda	90 days
Zambia	90 days
Zimbabwe	90 days

The Americas and the Caribbean (17)

Destination	Permitted stay
Antigua and Barbuda	180 days
Bahamas	90 days
Barbados	180 days
Belize	—
Costa Rica	30 days
Dominican Republic	30 days
Ecuador	90 days
El Salvador	90 days
Grenada	90 days
Guatemala	90 days
Haiti	90 days
Honduras	90 days
Jamaica	—
Nicaragua	90 days
Panama	90 days
Peru	180 days
Trinidad and Tobago	—

Asia and the Pacific (7)

Destination	Permitted stay
Fiji	120 days
Hong Kong	90 days
Kiribati	90 days
Malaysia	30 days
Micronesia	30 days
Philippines	30 days
Singapore	30 days

Europe (5)

Destination	Permitted stay
Belarus	30 days
Bosnia and Herzegovina	90 days
Moldova	90 days / 180
Montenegro	90 days
Russia	90 days per calendar year

Territories (15)

Destination	Permitted stay
Anguilla	3 months
Bermuda	—
British Virgin Islands	—
Cayman Islands	—
Cook Islands	31 days
French Guiana	—
French Polynesia	—
Gibraltar	—
Montserrat	—
New Caledonia	—
Niue	30 days
Pitcairn Islands	14 days, landing fee
Réunion	—
Saint Pierre and Miquelon	—
Wallis and Futuna	3 months

Visa on arrival

A visa is issued on arrival when the passport is presented. Expect a fee, and expect some destinations to require onward travel or accommodation. It is convenient, but the admission decision still happens at the border.

Africa (6)

Destination	Permitted stay
Burundi	30 days
Cape Verde	30 days
Comoros	45 days
Egypt	30 days
Senegal	30 days
Seychelles	3 months

Asia and the Pacific (10)

Destination	Permitted stay
Macau	—
Maldives	30 days
Marshall Islands	90 days
Nauru	90 days
Palau	30 days
Samoa	60 days
Solomon Islands	45 days
Timor-Leste	30 days
Tonga	31 days
Tuvalu	30 days

Both eVisa and visa on arrival (10)

Destination	Permitted stay
Bolivia	90 days
Cambodia	30 days
Guinea-Bissau	90 days
Laos	30 days
Madagascar	90 days
Malawi	30 days
Mozambique	30 days
Nepal	90 days
Sierra Leone	30 days
Thailand	15–30 days

Partially recognised territories

These are included in the ranking total and therefore listed here. The conditions attached to several make the access more theoretical than practical.

Territory	Access and conditions
Kosovo	visa free, 90 days
Northern Cyprus	visa free
Palestine	visa free
Akrotiri and Dhekelia	no visa; a permit is required for stays over 28 days in a 12-month period
South Ossetia	no visa of its own, yet you need a Russian multiple-entry visa and must give three days' notice
Transnistria	visa free; registration required after 24 hours
Somaliland	visa on arrival, 30 days, US$30

Electronic visa — not visa-free

A further 40 destinations issue electronic visas to Vanuatu citizens. An eVisa is an application with a fee and a decision, taken online rather than at an embassy, and it is not part of the 88. Counting eVisas is the ordinary route to a published total above a hundred.

Africa (16)

Nigeria, Togo, Benin, Liberia, Guinea, Mauritania, Burkina Faso; Gabon, Cameroon, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, the Democratic Republic of the Congo; Kenya, Djibouti, Libya, Namibia

.

Asia (20)

Vietnam, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Bhutan; Armenia, Georgia; Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Israel; Qatar, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates

.

Europe and the Americas (4)

Albania, Colombia, Cuba, Ukraine

.

Where a Visa Must Be Arranged First

For most applicants the absences carry the weight, and two of them are recent.

Schengen states. Visa needed. Visa-free entry was suspended entirely from 4 February 2023. Regulation (EU) 2025/11, adopted on 19 December 2024, turned that into a permanent rule: since 3 February 2025 Vanuatu has been on the Annex I list in Regulation (EU) 2018/1806.

United Kingdom. A visa has been compulsory from 19 July 2023, the day Vanuatu went onto the visa national list in the Immigration Rules' Appendix Visitor.

Japan, China, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the United States. Each requires a visa, and not one of them has at any point admitted Vanuatu passport holders without it.

Each destination owns its entry rules and may change them without warning. What you see here was correct when written, so before you book, check with the immigration authority of the place you are going to.