It is the first hard question a serious buyer asks, and it should be. If you have read anything about Vanuatu citizenship written before 2025, you have read that the passport opens the Schengen Area. That is no longer true, and any advisor who lets you believe it still is has disqualified themselves. We would rather lose the sale than win it on a number that expired. So let us put the whole thing on the table, in order, and then decide what is actually left.
The short version: Vanuatu's visa waiver with the European Union was suspended, in stages, and then ended. The passport that once cleared Schengen on arrival now requires a visa for Europe. None of that is in dispute, and none of it is hidden on this site. The longer version is where the decision actually lives, because what remains is more useful than the headline suggests, and the buyer it suits is more specific than the brochures admit.
What actually happened.
The European Union did not act on a whim. It acted on its own visa-suspension mechanism, the formal process by which it can withdraw visa-free treatment from a country it believes is issuing passports without adequate screening. The concern was Vanuatu's investor-citizenship program itself: the speed of it, and the due diligence the EU judged insufficient for people who would then hold visa-free access to the bloc. It is worth being clear-eyed that the EU's objection was to weak vetting, which is precisely the part of the file we treat as the product, not the paperwork.
The timeline ran in stages. A partial suspension began in 2022, aimed first at passports issued after a 2015 cutoff. The United Kingdom moved separately in July 2023, adding a visitor-visa requirement for Vanuatu nationals on the same golden-passport reasoning. Then, on 12 December 2024, the Council of the European Union ended the visa-waiver agreement outright. The change took effect on 4 February 2025. Since that date, a Vanuatu passport holder needs a visa to enter the Schengen Area. There is no asterisk that walks this back, and you should distrust anyone who offers you one.
We would rather lose the sale than win it on a number that expired.
Why the number on our map already reflects it.
Look at the figure we publish: eighty-seven destinations, visa-free or visa-on-arrival, cited to the Henley Passport Index for 2026. That is not a pre-2025 number with Europe quietly still counted in. It is the current number, measured after the Schengen withdrawal, after the UK change, after everything above. When the independent index recalculated Vanuatu's reach with Europe removed, eighty-seven is what remained. We quote the post-Schengen figure on purpose, because quoting anything else would be quoting a passport that no longer exists.
This matters for one practical reason. A prospect who has done their homework arrives expecting to catch us inflating the number. They cannot, because the number already absorbs the loss. The exercise of checking it against the live index is one we encourage, not one we fear. That is the whole posture of this firm in a single data point.
What Europe actually requires now.
Visa-required is not the same as barred. A Vanuatu holder who wants to visit Europe applies for a Schengen short-stay visa, the standard Type C, through the consulate of the country they are entering. It is an appointment, a form, supporting documents, and a wait. It is the same process most of the world's passport holders follow for Europe, and it is not exotic. What it is not is automatic.
One technical point that trips people up: ETIAS, the travel authorization the EU is rolling out, does not rescue a Vanuatu passport. ETIAS is for visa-exempt nationalities, the ones who keep visa-free access but must pre-register. Vanuatu is no longer in that category, so ETIAS does not apply; an actual visa does. If a competitor tells you "you will just use ETIAS," they have misread the rule, and it is a useful tell about the quality of their advice.
What eighty-seven still covers.
Here is the part the headline buries. The destinations Vanuatu still reaches are weighted toward exactly the corridor most of our clients actually move through. Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, much of Southeast Asia, the wider Asia-Pacific. For a Bitcoin holder whose life runs between those hubs, the passport's reach overlaps their real map almost completely, and the absence of Europe is a line item they never use. The question is never "how many flags" in the abstract. It is "how many of the flags I personally fly through," and for a large share of our files that overlap is near total.
Add the structural features Europe never affected. Vanuatu levies zero personal income tax, zero capital gains tax, and zero inheritance tax. The file still moves in thirty to sixty days, the fastest serious program in the world. The citizenship is permanent and hereditary. None of those four facts changed on 4 February 2025. What changed was one continent's entry stamp, and for the right holder that continent was never the reason they were here.
Who should not choose Vanuatu.
This is the section most firms delete. If reliable, repeated, frictionless access to Europe is the center of your life, if you are choosing a passport substantially because of Schengen, then Vanuatu is the wrong tool and we will tell you so on the first call. There are better-fitted routes for that goal, including programs in the slate with a long-horizon path toward European residency, and we would rather point you to one than sell you the wrong one. Our eligibility screener is built to fail you out of Vanuatu honestly when Europe is your driver; that is a feature, not a bug.
If, on the other hand, your corridor is Asia-Pacific, your priority is a zero-tax jurisdiction across every category, you value speed because a banking or reporting deadline is real, and Europe is a place you visit occasionally rather than live around, then the Schengen loss costs you a visa appointment and nothing structural. For that person, and there are more of them than the headline implies, the post-Schengen passport is the same instrument it always was, honestly priced and honestly described.
Adam Juchniewicz, CEO, 21 CBI
Buenos Aires · May 2026