A New study on passports has revealed European passports especially from Nordic countries are the strongest and most powerful passports in the world. The study was done by Best Citizenships (BC) in association with World Citizenship Council (WCC) to rank the best and strongest passport in the world for visa free movement.
Visa restrictions curtails freedom of movement for those who are lucky born with strong passports country and unlucky for those with weakest passports. As we head towards the future, globalization, world events puts pressure on immigration systems, causing to enforce more visa restrictions. Several countries already moved to electronic visa platforms to make it easier and faster for travelers. The prospect of traveling in future with just a passport looks slim because of eVisa or eTA requirement for every traveler, in addition to passport.
Our study looked into hard and soft visas for 199 passports in the world. We also analyzed visa restrictions to 196 countries (excluding territories) and the results are quite interesting.
We thought about few important questions first with passports before we designed our scoring model.
- Which is the best passport in the world giving me maximum travel freedom with less visa restrictions?
- What good is a passport if does not have access to the BIG-6 countries? That is United States, United Kingdom, Canada, EU schengen, Russia and China?
- Does the passport offer safety and protection in case of emergencies traveling abroad? How many embassies/consulates are there for passport holders?
- Dual citizens are issued more than one passport. Can i combine my passports to maximize by visa free movement?
These are the features of passports we looked further.
1. Visa free access with just a passport (1 point)
2. Soft visa categories (eVisa, ETA, Visa on arrival) (0.5 points)
3. Visa free access to BIG-6 countries (US, UK, EU schengen, Canada, Russia, China ) (5 points)
4. Use of combing dual passports to maximize visa free travel (5 points)
6. Consulate protection abroad for passport holders during emergency (5 points)
As a result of uniquely designed scoring model,
- We love passports that offers full visa free movement without any travel restrictions including eVisa / eTA
- Passports that have visa access to BIG-6 countries (US/UK/Canada/EU/Russia/China) in the world are given boost in rankings. This can be also a soft visa.
- Countries that are not open to dual citizenship do not perform very well in the rankings.
- Passports with soft visa restrictions (eVisa/VOA/ETA) also score low in rankings. We still think soft visas are slight form of visa restrictions.
- Hard visas (visa required at embassy) receive zero points.
We used freely and openly available visa restrictions information from Wikipedia. We extracted the wikipedia database using API, extracted and processed the data using python tools and libraries, and finally arriving at the numbers.
Results
Our study showed European passports especially from Nordic countries dominated our best passport rankings for 2020.
- Denmark and Finland are the world’s most powerful and strongest passports.
- Italy and Sweden have the second best passports in the world.
- Brunei is the only country in the world that has visa free access to all BIG-6 countries.
- Chilean passport moved up in rankings becoming a powerful passport in the Americas tied with Canada as it has visa freedom to visit BIG-5 countries except China.
- US/UK passports are tied at sixth place. The value of US and UK passports cannot be discounted.
- Norwegian passport jumped up to fourth place after the country fully allowed dual citizenship from Jan 2020.
- Afghanistan and Somalia are the weakest passports in the world.
- Seychelles and Mauritius have the best passports in Africa.
- Poland passport moved up in ranks after new visa waiver program (VWP) implemented with United States
- Greek and Portuguese passport tied at fourth place. Both countries offer popular golden visa schemes in Europe.
These are the top 10 strongest passports in the world
- Denmark / Finland
- Italy / Sweden
- Belgium / Spain / Japan
- Greece / Norway / Portugal
- Singapore
- Hungary / Switzerland / United States / United Kingdom
- Poland
- France / Ireland
- Germany
- Luxembourg / Netherlands
The full ranking list for all passports countries can be downloaded here
