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The standard rankings (Henley, Arton, Nomad) all count destinations. A stamp into Tuvalu (10K visitors a year) is worth the same as a stamp into France (90M). That bothered me, so I rebuilt it.
I weighted every accessible destination by its annual tourist arrivals. The unit is "tourists of reach", not "countries".
What changed:
Top passport: South Korea. ~1.4B tourists of reach. Not Japan, not Singapore.
The US is the most lopsided "one-way" passport. Americans get into roughly 3.5x more global tourism than the US lets in.
Most welcoming country: Maldives. Then Rwanda, Kenya.
Friendliest place nobody visits: Burundi. Door open to nearly every passport. Almost no one shows up.
Biggest 2026 shift: China. Opening to UK, Canada, and Gulf states adds ~455M tourists of reach to those passports.
Data: Henley & Arton access data plus UNWTO arrivals. I tried per-capita weighting first. Andorra and the Vatican won the ranking, so I dropped it.
Curious what HN thinks I'm getting wrong. Especially on ETA vs visa-on-arrival, which I currently treat as equivalent.
ForesynWanna keep in touch?
Built this solo over a weekend. Soft-launching before the HN post on Monday. If you scored a draft and the prediction either nailed it or whiffed, I want to know.