Frequently asked questions

Yes, completely. All five tools (world map, countries map, US states map, city pins, road trip planner) are free to use with no account required. Your data is saved automatically in your browser.

No. Everything works without an account. You can optionally sign in with Google to personalize your experience, but your map data is stored in your browser's local storage either way — it never leaves your device.

All of your selections (visited countries, wishlist, city pins, road trip stops) are saved in your browser's local storage. Nothing is sent to a server. This means your map is available on this device and browser only — if you clear your browser data, the map resets. We plan to add cross-device sync in the future.

Yes. Click the “Download map” button in the top navigation bar or in the stats bar at the bottom of any map page. The map is saved as a high-resolution PNG file.

The standard count is 195 — the 193 UN member states plus Vatican City and Palestine (the two non-member observer states). This is the baseline My Travel Maps uses. We have a detailed breakdown in our article on how many countries are there in the world.

There is no universal rule, but the most widely used convention is the “left the airport” rule: if you cleared passport control and set foot on the ground outside the airport, it counts. We walk through five common rules and the clubs that use them in what counts as visiting a country.

Under most rules, no. If you stayed inside the international transit area and never cleared immigration, most travelers and counting communities do not consider it a visit. This is the single biggest line in the sand in the country-counting community.

Neither holds UN membership or observer status. Kosovo declared independence in 2008 and is recognized by about half of UN members; Taiwan lost its UN seat in 1971 when it was transferred to the People's Republic of China. Many travelers count one or both separately. We explain the full background in our piece on disputed countries.

The rule is: mark the modern country that contains the place you actually stood. If you visited Dubrovnik in 1985 (then Yugoslavia), mark Croatia. If you visited Moscow in 1988 (then the USSR), mark Russia. We walk through every major dissolution in countries that no longer exist.

Three overlapping but different things. The EU is a political and economic union of 27 member states. The Schengen Area is a border-free zone of 29 countries. Europe is a continent of 44+ countries. Some EU members are not in Schengen (Ireland, Cyprus); some Schengen members are not in the EU (Norway, Switzerland). We explain the full picture in Schengen vs. EU vs. Europe.

The median person on Earth has visited one country — their own. The median resident of a rich Western country has visited 3 to 10, depending on which country. If you have visited 25 countries, you are in roughly the top 5 percent of any rich country's population. Full data and sources in how many countries has the average person visited.

Five interactive tools, all free: World travel map (countries + US states), countries visited map, US states visited map, city pins map (drop pins on cities you have visited), and road trip planner (plan routes with stops and driving distances).

Yes. The city pins map lets you click anywhere on the world map to drop a pin. You can name each pin (or accept the auto-suggested city name), edit names later, and remove pins by clicking them. All pins are saved locally in your browser.

The road trip planner lets you click stops on the map in order. The tool calculates the driving route between each stop using the OSRM routing engine, shows the total distance and estimated driving time, and draws the route on the map. You can drag stops to reorder them and remove any stop by clicking it.

Yes. All five tools and all blog pages are mobile-friendly. The maps work with touch gestures (pinch to zoom, tap to select). The stats bar and navigation adapt to smaller screens.

Country boundaries come from Natural Earth (110-metre resolution TopoJSON). US state boundaries come from the US Census Bureau's TIGER dataset. The basemap tiles are CartoDB Voyager, built on OpenStreetMap data. Road trip routes are calculated by the OSRM routing engine. City name suggestions come from BigDataCloud reverse geocoding.

Yes. Planned features include cross-device sync (so your map follows you across browsers), shareable map URLs, and PNG download customization. If you have a feature request, contact us at mytravelmaps.org/contact.