Being born in a country with a weak passport can hamper your travel experience in ways I never imagined before. I was born in one such country and travelling was always a pain. I needed a visa for pretty much every country worth visiting, was given the side eye during check in, and in some countries subjected to secondary checks. Switched to a European passport a few years ago and I’ve never had a better travel experience. Somehow, i felt I was treated with greater respect than before.
TIL there was such a thing as a passport ranking. I had assumed an EU country would top the list because of the eurozone, so pleasantly surprised by many of the countries in the top 10 (especially Singapore!)
Everything else is either visa on arrival or the same between the two (or worse for Singapore).
I'd like to see Cuba and Iran. Maybe Vietnam. Kenya, I've been to, although at the time the visa was granted at entry (though it was not free). And not all of the e-visas are free.
But in the grand scheme of things, my US passport makes it harder in four countries I would ever have an interest in going to unless there was something spectacular I don't know about. Seems like it's a pretty minor thing, not like it was in the early 90s when I needed a Taiwanese visa that required going to a consulate.
Pretty much all "rich country" citizen issues boil down to a handful of highly restrictive states and a few that have particular issues with the US government. It's not really limiting me the way that, say, an Indian passport would.
USA not qualifying because the USA is very hated by locally powerful countries that don't like that the USA doesn't let them run amok, e.g. Russia, China, Iran.
I was thinking their external affairs. I don't think most westerners give a fuck what Russia is doing internally. But sure, whatever makes you feel better.
The original source[1] of the news article provides a lot more detail and information. Interesting that a British passport has climbed up in the ranking two places to 4th place, despite Brexit, while the US passport is declining.
The company also has a useful database of all passports you can check for your own passports and see what countries you can enter visa-free.[2]
They are rigging the results by not counting the new restrictions on UK citizens entering and operating within 27 EU countries, including the 5 countries they visit most: Spain, France, Italy, Greece, and Portugal.
No honest person would claim that the UK passport is equal to the Danish, Irish, or Dutch passport. Absurd.
I am not aware of even one country, anywhere in the world, that has made entry easier for UK citizens following Brexit. Certainly, nothing has happened over the past year to justify the UK rising in the ranks.
I have a UK passport but, even before Brexit, found it more pragmatic to travel on my Irish passport. British tourists have long had a somewhat tarnished reputation and, in some countries, resentments still linger from Britain's rather brutal past.
Since Brexit, over a million UK citizens have applied for and received Irish passports, giving them back the EU citizenship rights they had before Brexit.
Europe went tit for tat during some of the 2016+ debacles when it came to visas and basically is requiring all US visitors get visas starting from 2024.
So that's going to be some of the mobility decline for US travelers
In general, countries that rank high in this index, are countries that "work well" with the 'community of nations'. Regardless how one may feel about that.
In my case (Dutch passport): the Netherlands is a member of many inter-governmental organizations, regarded as trustworthy & often working to advance common goals. Longtime stable democracy, financial & (mostly) functional legal system. And thus travellers carrying a Dutch passport are welcomed in many places.
It's easy to see that for example socialist-leaning nations may not be 'liked' by the US (and vice versa, often for good reasons), and prefer to go their own way. I don't judge / have no beef with that. A sovereign state is just that.
But net result may well be that such a country takes part in fewer trade agreements, is a member of fewer 'country communities', and has less-friendly relations with some other countries.
And for example an assortment of African countries may be recovering from colonial history, or too busy with internal problems to focus much on international relations.
Again: no judgement here. It is what it is. But these things are exactly what tends to produce lower rankings. Rub some countries the wrong way, and find your citizens are less welcome there.
