Counting countries: what actually counts

Ask two well-travelled people how many countries they have been to and you will get two numbers that are not comparable, because they are not counting the same thing.

The disagreement is old, genuine, and has never been settled. But the positions are at least well-defined.

The strict rule: you must clear immigration

Under the strictest interpretation, a country counts only if you passed through its border control and entered its territory proper.

This excludes airside transit — the several hours you spent in Doha between flights do not make Qatar a country you have visited, because you never legally entered it. It also excludes flying over, and it excludes the odd cases where you land but never leave the aircraft.

It is the most defensible rule, and the hardest one on your total. Frequent connectors lose a lot of countries to it.

The airport rule: wheels down counts

The most permissive common rule: if your aircraft touched the ground there, it counts.

This is popular for the obvious reason that it produces bigger numbers, and it has a certain internal logic — you were physically present in the country's sovereign territory, immigration formalities notwithstanding.

Most people who quote a country count above 100 are using something close to this rule.

The Travelers' Century Club rule

The Travelers' Century Club, founded in 1954 for people who had visited 100 or more countries, publishes its own list — and it is not a list of countries at all. It's a list of 330-odd territories, which splits places that are politically one country but geographically or culturally distinct.

Hawaii and Alaska count separately from the mainland United States. So do the Canary Islands, Sicily, Tasmania, Easter Island, and about two hundred other places. The rationale is that the club is interested in how much of the world you've seen, not how many passports you've been stamped by.

It produces the largest numbers of all, and it is entirely internally consistent. It just isn't answering the same question.

The UN member state baseline

The most objective baseline: the 193 United Nations member states, plus the two observer states (Vatican City and Palestine).

This has the advantage of being a fixed, published, uncontroversial list that nobody has to argue about. Its awkwardness is at the edges — Taiwan, Kosovo and a handful of others are excluded despite being places you can obviously visit.

Which to use

Use whichever you like, but be consistent, and say which one you're using when you quote a number. "Forty-one, counting airport transit" is a meaningful statement. "Forty-one" on its own is not.

For what it's worth, the rule that seems to satisfy most people is the middle one: you count a country if you left the airport. It excludes the technicality of airside transit while not demanding that you produce a stamp, and it maps closely onto the intuition of having actually been somewhere.

That's the rule Orbit follows. A flight into a country counts it as visited; a connection you flew through doesn't, unless you logged something there.

The number isn't the point

It's worth saying, because country-counting can curdle into something joyless: the number is a byproduct, not a goal. The people who chase it hardest tend to be the ones optimising for the shortest possible visit — a day trip to tick a box, and on to the next.

The more interesting number, for most people, is the map. Thirty-one countries clustered across two continents tells a very different story from thirty-one spread across six, and the count alone can't distinguish them.

Which is why Orbit shows you a globe first and a total second.

Related: how many times around the Earth you've flown and reconstructing your flight history.