Samoa

Samoa asks a United States passport for nothing in advance: the entry permit is issued free at Faleolo on arrival for up to 90 days, there is no form, no fee and no portal, and 90 days is a genuinely generous allowance by the standards of this region rather than a figure to test. Carry the onward ticket and the first accommodation booking in a form you can show on a phone. Across the Pacific these are asked for far more consistently than in most of the world, and they are asked for by the AIRLINE at check-in rather than by Samoa at the door - a carrier that lands somebody in a country they have no way out of owns the cost of taking them home, so the refusal comes from a check-in agent hours before anyone official has looked at your passport. A yellow fever certificate is required if you have come from a country where the disease is present, and the threshold the International Health Regulations set is a transit of more than twelve hours in an airport of such a country rather than any transit at all - check it against the whole routing rather than the departure airport, because almost nothing in this part of the world is fewer than three flights. The complication here is not the border but the date line, and it catches people who plan to combine Samoa with American Samoa 130 kilometres away. Samoa moved to the western side of the line at the end of 2011, so the two are a calendar day apart: a flight from Apia to Pago Pago takes about half an hour and lands yesterday, and one going back lands tomorrow. Check every booking against the right date rather than against the flying time. The other half of that trip is a separate immigration question - American Samoa runs its own immigration rules rather than the United States', so what applies there is not what applies at Honolulu, and it is worth checking on its own terms even though the territory is American. Inside Samoa, the practical things: the country is genuinely safe, medical facilities are basic with New Zealand as the evacuation destination, the fales on the south coast of Upolu are cash businesses, and measles vaccination is worth confirming before travel after the 2019 outbreak.

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Entry details: Editorial synthesis - Samoa Immigration entry permit practice, Samoa–American Samoa routings (2025–2026) · compiled 18 Sept 2026

Holding a passport that is not listed? The picker above answers for any of them. See where your passport takes you. Source: Passport Index, updated 14 Aug 2026.

December and January bring diaspora returns and fill Apia, and the September Teuila festival does the same on a smaller scale. Otherwise prices are steady.

Updated Aug 2026 · Editorial synthesis - Samoa Tourism Authority listings and accommodation sampling (2025–2026) · confidence high

Excludes international flights - they depend on where you fly from.