Two Passports, the Same Score, Completely Different Worlds
2026-09-15
Kosovo and Guyana both reach 117 destinations without arranging permission in advance. They share rank 42 in our table. By every number on the front of the site, they are the same passport.
They are not. Forty destinations are open to Kosovo and closed to Guyana, and forty are open to Guyana and closed to Kosovo. A third of each passport's access is in a place the other cannot go.
The shape of the difference
Counted from our own dataset in October 2026, the 40 destinations exclusive to each passport break down by region like this:
| Region | Open to Kosovo only | Open to Guyana only |
|---|---|---|
| Europe | 37 | 4 |
| Asia | 2 | 10 |
| Americas | 0 | 16 |
| Africa | 0 | 6 |
| Oceania | 1 | 4 |
Kosovo's advantage is almost entirely one region. Guyana's is spread across four. Same total, and the two passports are not substitutes for each other in any practical sense.
If you live in the Americas and travel regionally, these two passports are not equivalent — one of them is worth considerably more to you than its rank suggests, and the other considerably less. The number cannot express that, because the number was never counting it.
Why this happens everywhere, not just here
Visa agreements cluster. They follow regional blocs, shared history, language, trade arrangements and reciprocity. A passport does not accumulate access evenly across the globe — it accumulates it in neighbourhoods.
Two passports can therefore arrive at the same total through entirely different routes: one through deep access to a single dense region, another through shallower access spread across several. The total is identical. The experience of holding them is not.
We found this pair by searching our own table for the equal-score pair with the greatest divergence. It is the most extreme case, not an isolated one — the same test turns up pairs at score 149 and score 110 with 20 destinations differing on each side.
What this means for how you read the site
The score answers a general question. How much of the world is open, in the aggregate. That is a legitimate thing to measure and a reasonable thing to compare internationally.
It does not answer your question. Yours is usually: can I go where I actually want to go? That question is answered by the destination list, not by the total.
So when you land on a country page, the useful move is to scroll past the score to the destination list and search for the places on your own route. The number at the top is context. The list is the answer.
You can do this directly for any two passports with the side-by-side comparison, which shows both destination lists rather than only their totals.
The ranking is not wrong — it is narrow
None of this makes the score meaningless. Counting open destinations is a clear, reproducible measure, and across the whole table it tracks something real: a passport at 182 genuinely opens far more of the world than one at 40.
The problem is only at close range. Two passports a few points apart, or on the same point, are not meaningfully ordered by that gap — and ranking them anyway creates a precision the underlying data does not support. This is the same effect that makes ranks move without any policy changing, explained in why your rank moved.
How to verify this yourself
Every figure above is a count from the dataset published on this site. You can reproduce it: open the two country pages, filter each destination list to visa-free and visa-on-arrival, and compare. We would rather you checked than took our word for it.
Our visa data comes from the open Passport Index dataset, refreshed automatically every day, with our own verified corrections applied on top. It is not an official government feed — confirm with the embassy or consulate before you travel.
Related
- What a passport ranking measures
- Why your rank moved
- What a second passport actually adds
- Not all of your score is visa-free
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