Introduction

I was recently complaining about how much I hate traveling during lunch at work. My blissfully European colleagues found this very amusing. Upon collectively investigating my strong dislike for traveling, we uncovered the root of this - PAPERWORK. This made me realize that I only hate traveling by proxy and we tried to answer the following question.

Which passport would make me (and more generally anyone with a dislike of paperwork) like traveling the most?

The Henley Passport Index (and my problem with it)

One of my colleagues suggested looking at a passport index for a possible answer to this question, and we stumbled onto the Henley Passport Index.

The HP Index ranks passports based on the number of destinations their holders can access without a prior visa. The scoring is straightforward: each destination a passport holder can visit without a visa counts as 1 point. These points are added up, and the higher the total, the stronger your passport.

If we use the HP index to answer our original question, the answer would simply be: the country with the passport that allows its holder to travel to the most number of countries.

Based on the HP index, the answer to my question would be Singapore.

Initially, this sounds like a good idea but I had one qualm with it. Let’s say $C$ is the set of countries I can visit and $W$ is the set of countries I want to to visit. The HP index is the number of elements in $C$. A better index would only look at countries I can and want to visit i.e. the number of elements in $C \cap W$.

The Singaporean passport would allow me to travel to 193 countries without a visa, but (let’s say) I am only interested in visiting 20 countries. If 15 of those countries require me to get a visa despite my “powerful” passport, then effectively my passport only gives me visa-free access to 5 countries I actually care about. Meanwhile, someone with a “weaker” passport that only offers visa-free access to 100 countries might have visa-free access to all 20 countries on my wish list. For my specific travel preferences, their “weaker” passport would actually be more valuable to me!

How do I know what I want?

Now obviously, I could go through every country in the world, determine my personal set $W$, calculate $C \cap W$ for each passport, and figure out which passport would make me like traveling the most but I have two major issues with that approach:

• It only answers the question for me (which was the original point, but what if someone else has the same issue?)
• I do NOT want to manually evaluate all 195 countries in the world. Remember, I hate paperwork! This is exactly the kind of tediousness I am trying to avoid.

What we need is a more generalized approach—a heuristic that could work for most people without requiring them to explicitly rank every country on Earth. This heuristic ($h$) would reflect how many people want to go to a country, and instead of simply adding 1 point per accessible country, we would weight each country by its desirability, adding $h \times 1$ points.

Let me illustrate this with an example: Compare France and Burkina Faso. Both would count equally (1 point each) on the traditional Henley Passport Index. But let’s be honest—if you surveyed a thousand random people about which countries they dream of visiting, France would likely appear on many more wish lists than Burkina Faso. That’s not a judgment on Burkina Faso’s worth as a nation—it’s simply recognizing the reality of global travel preferences shaped by factors like tourism infrastructure, global media exposure, and perceived safety.

So in our weighted system, if France has an $h$ value of 0.8 and Burkina Faso has an $h$ value of 0.05, a passport that grants access to France would add 0.8 points to its score, while access to Burkina Faso would add 0.05 points. This creates a more realistic measure of how valuable visa-free access to each country actually is for the average traveler.

Developing a Desirability metric

At the lunch table, our first instinct was to create a comprehensive desirability index by collecting and joining multiple datasets: tourism statistics, crime rates, GDP per capita, infrastructure quality, cultural attractions, …

The issue with this approach is clear, the list of datasets that need to be taken into account is endless and there are just too many JOINs required. What I really needed was a proxy for desirability. Something simple that can account for most of the factors such as global connectivity, diplomatic relations, etc.

And then my (arguably) elegant JOIN free metric came to me. Here’s how my heuristic works: For each country (let’s call it $c$) that a passport grants me access to, I add $1 \times h_c$ where:

In other words, I’m using the relative strength of a country’s own passport as a proxy for how desirable it is to visit that country! With some post hoc rationalization, I liked this even more!

If many countries are willing to grant visa-free access to citizens of country X, it suggests that country X has positive relations with many nations and is considered “desirable” to visit.

The Bansal-Solecki-Pop Index

I named this index the Bansal-Solecki-Pop after myself and my fellow colleagues that dealt with me during this conversation.

A simple python script implementing this clearly superior index can be found here - https://github.com/prnvbn/BansalSoleckiPopIndex

Was this worth it?

Looking at the difference between the HP and the BSP index rankings, we observe the following:

• The rankings changed for 165 countries (that’s a lot of countries, maybe it is worth it)
• The mean is 0 (woah, that is pretty cool, but maybe it isn’t worth it)
• The standard deviation is ~4.6
• The biggest difference is Kosovo jumping up 18 places and Mali and Cote d’Ivoire dropping down 9 places
• The strongest passport in the world changed - According to the HP index, Singapore is the strongest passport. However, according to the BSP Index, South Korea is the strongest (jumping up from #3, while Singapore falls all the way down to #2).

Reflecting on the lunch break conversation that was shadowed by this, the time I spent writing this post, the quick python script and the fact that the answer to the question actually changed…

Yes, it was worth it.

Now, I can answer the question “which passport would make me like traveling the most?”.

And the answer is South Korea, not Singapore.