To list every country you’ve visited, combine sources: the stamps in your passports, official border records you can request, the booking confirmations in your email, your phone’s location history and the locations saved on your photos. No single one is complete. Cross-check them, add each country with a year, and decide once whether layovers count.
Why your passport isn’t enough
Passport stamps were never meant to be a travel diary. Nothing reads them for you, the ink fades, and the stamps in an old passport are easy to lose track of once it expires. More and more crossings leave no stamp at all.
- Travel between Schengen countries has no border checks, so a train from Paris to Rome leaves nothing in your passport.
- Since 10 April 2026, the EU’s Entry/Exit System has replaced passport stamping for non-EU visitors on short stays: the record is digital.
- Automated gates often skip the stamp. Japan’s face-recognition gates, for example, give one only if you ask an officer.
- Land crossings, ferries and cruise stops can go unstamped, and they are the easiest trips to forget.
So use your stamps, from every passport you still have, as a starting list rather than the answer.
Ask for your official border records
Some governments will show you their own record of your crossings. Each covers only that country’s border: it tells you when you left and came back, not where you went in between. Still, those dates are the best anchor you have for the trips around them.
- United States: visitors can use View Travel History on CBP’s official I-94 website (i94.cbp.dhs.gov) for their recent arrivals and departures, free of charge. Anyone, including US citizens, can ask CBP for their own records of international travel to and from the US with a Freedom of Information Act request.
- United Kingdom: the Home Office takes free requests for the personal information its borders, immigration and citizenship records hold on you, through its subject access request form.
- Japan: Japanese citizens can request their departure and return records from the Immigration Services Agency, back to 1 April 1973, for 300 yen a request.
- Schengen area: the Entry/Exit System now records non-EU visitors’ entries and exits at the external borders, but not the moves between Schengen countries.
Search your email for confirmations
Your inbox is usually the most complete record you already own. Flight, hotel, train and car-rental confirmations name a place and a date, and many go back years. Search for words such as “boarding pass”, “e-ticket”, “itinerary”, “booking confirmation” and “reservation”, then for the airlines and hotel chains you use.
Remember that a booking is not proof you went: trips get cancelled and changed. A later email, such as a check-in reminder, a hotel receipt or a review request, is better evidence. Frequent-flyer and hotel loyalty accounts also list past stays and flights you can export or screenshot.
Check your location history and photos
If Google Maps Timeline was on, it may hold years of places. Google now keeps Timeline on your phone, not online, and it is not available in Google Maps on a computer, so open the Google Maps app and scroll back through it. If it was off or the data wasn’t kept, there is nothing to recover there.
Photos are often the best memory aid of all. Most phones save where a photo was taken, and on an iPhone the Photos app can show your pictures on a map by location. Only photos with location information appear, so older camera and scanned pictures won’t.
Don’t forget the paper
- Old boarding passes and ticket stubs, including the ones tucked into books.
- Visas, entry cards and arrival slips stapled or glued into passports.
- Foreign coins and notes, receipts and travel insurance documents.
- Postcards, guidebooks and messages to family from the trip.
Step by step
- 1Decide what counts as a visit, for example only if you passed immigration or left the airport, and write the rule down.
- 2List the countries in the stamps and visas of every passport you still have.
- 3Request your official border records where they exist: the US I-94 or a CBP FOIA request, a UK subject access request, or Japan’s departure and return records.
- 4Search your email for boarding passes, e-tickets, itineraries and hotel confirmations, and add each country with the year.
- 5Scroll back through Google Maps Timeline on your phone if you had it on, and browse your photos by location.
- 6Fill the gaps from paper: old boarding passes, entry cards, receipts and postcards.
- 7Mark anything you only booked but may not have taken, and confirm it from a second source.
- 8Keep the finished list in one place and add each new trip as you book it.
How Yuki helps
Yuki doesn’t read passport stamps or government records. What it does is keep the trips themselves, and count the countries in them. With Gmail connected on Pro, Yuki finds the flight, hotel and train confirmations in your inbox and builds each trip for you. On Free, you add trips by hand.
- A count and a map. The top of Trips shows how many countries you’ve been to, the share of the world that is, and their flags. Tap it for Your passport: countries, cities and continents, a breakdown by continent and a world map.
- Departures count too. Each trip adds its destination country and the country it left from, so the start of a one-way journey isn’t lost.
- Where you are now. On your phone, Profile → Visited Countries → Live location marks the country you’re in when you open Yuki, at most once a day and only while the app is open.
- Your photos, on Android. Photo library scan in the same place adds countries from photos that carry a location. It runs on your phone, and only country names leave it.
- Mark the rest by hand. On the web, the Visited countries button at the top of Trips lets you add a country from your list, shows where each one came from, and lets you remove one you marked.