Where our data comes from

Bilitly is a planning tool, not an immigration authority. The entry verdict on a card is our reading of published rules and an open dataset; the money is our estimate. Only the destination's own embassy or immigration service can tell you whether you may enter, and only a booking can tell you what a trip costs. Every figure on a card carries a tag saying whether it is an estimate or a fetched price, and every entry rule links the page it came from.

The starting label for a passport and a destination comes from an open community dataset that a volunteer scrapes from passportindex.org. It is not an official source, it is a single snapshot rather than a live feed, and it can miss any change made since the scrape.

Source

imorte/passport-index-data

Licence

MIT

Snapshot date

18 February 2026 (7 months ago)

We downloaded it

15 September 2026

Covers

199 passports, about 39,400 country pairs, and 2,514 visa-free day limits

Used for

the first entry label on every planner card, before our own rules are applied

Known limit: the repository holds one commit, dated 18 February 2026, so rebuilding does not refresh the labels. Finding a maintained successor, or owning the scrape, is an open task on our side, and the age is printed under every set of results.

On top of the dataset, Bilitly encodes the rules that matter to a student living in Europe, above all what a Schengen residence permit changes for a passport that needs a visa on its own. Each rule was read off an official page, and each page carries its own check date. The oldest of those checks was 12 September 2026. Every card links the page behind its own verdict.

• Your Europe: entry rules for non-EU nationals
• Schengen Borders Code, Regulation (EU) 2016/399
• European Commission, EU Immigration Portal: Already in the EU?
• European Commission: visa policy
• Andorra Turisme: passports, visas and customs
• Government of Monaco: staying in Monaco
• San Marino, Secretariat of State for Foreign Affairs: information for visitors
• Embassy of Albania in Poland: embassy services
• Embassy of Albania in the UAE: embassy services
• Government of Montenegro: visas
• North Macedonia MFA: entry information
• Embassy of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Berlin: visas
• Embassy of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the US: visas
• Serbia MFA: visa requirements
• Serbia MFA: visa regime for India
• Embassy of Serbia in Japan: travel to Serbia
• Georgia, Government Ordinance No 256
• Embassy of Georgia in Norway: mandatory tourist insurance
• Georgia e-Visa portal
• Law Library of Congress: Georgia, recognition of foreign passports
• Turkey MFA: visa information for foreigners
• Consulate General of Turkey in Los Angeles: conditional e-Visa
• Turkey e-Visa: validity of the supporting visa or permit
• Kosovo MFA and Diaspora: visas
• Kosovo MFA (archive site): categories exempt from visas
• Government of Serbia: freedom of movement agreement (2022)
• EEAS: Kosovo and Serbia normalisation agreement (2023)
• Armenia MFA: visa
• Armenia MFA: list of 111 countries (30 June 2026)
• Mexico INM: countries that need a visa
• Mexico INM: electronic authorisation (SAE)
• Colombia Cancilleria: Resolution 5488 of 2022
• Migracion Colombia: Resolution 2061 of 2020
• Argentina DNM: AVE
• Argentina Decree 746/2019, Art. 1
• Philippine eVisa portal: entry without a visa
• GOV.UK: electronic travel authorisation
• GOV.UK: check when you can get an ETA
• Royal Thai Embassy London: visa on arrival
• Tourism Authority of Thailand: visa rules from 15 September 2026
• Thai Government Public Relations Department: visa policy revision
• Thailand MFA: bilateral visa exemption for ordinary passports
• Thailand MFA: Thailand and China mutual visa exemption

The planner answers from 98 entry rules of our own before it looks at the open dataset. Each one was read on the destination's own official page (its government, a ministry, the immigration service, an embassy, a legal act, or the EU for Schengen), with the page's address, the day it was read and a sentence quoted from it, and a second reader opened the same page on its own and confirmed it. Both readings were done by AI. No rule is written while you plan, and every card that uses one of these rules links its page and says the day it was read.

A rule that opens a door (visa-free, a longer stay, a residence permit that counts) is used only when an official page read that day says so. When an official page could not be opened, a stricter rule may rest on two independent reports until a person opens it, and the rule says so.

Rules

98 rules for 18 destinations

Pages read

27 September 2026

Evidence

97 on the official page, 1 on two reports

Reviewed by a person

not yet (98 of 98 waiting)

The founder reads these rules again on the first of every month, beside the other monthly checks, and a rule a person has reviewed shows that day below.

Licences of the texts we quote

• Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
• © European Union, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/, 1998-2026 (CC BY 4.0, Commission Decision 2011/833/EU)

This is not official advice: a border officer decides entry, so confirm with the embassy or the immigration service before you book.

For nine destinations the fee on the receipt is the one the issuing authority publishes, converted to euro at the European Central Bank reference rate for 11 September 2026 (the Armenian dram at the Central Bank of Armenia rate, which the ECB does not quote). The receipt says which fee is a published one and links its page. Everywhere else the line is a typical figure for that kind of visa, labelled as such, never presented as the destination's own fee.

• European Commission: applying for a Schengen visa
• GOV.UK: electronic travel authorisation fee
• GOV.UK: standard visitor visa fee
• Irish Immigration: preclearance and entry visa fees
• Georgia e-Visa: fees
• Mexico INM: electronic authorisation (SAE)
• Armenia MFA: consular fees
• Egypt e-Visa: fees
• Royal Thai Embassy London: visa on arrival fee

Hand-set editorial bands: a hostel or budget-hotel nightly rate, a mid-range daily spend and a return economy flight range from a western European hub. They are estimates, never a live quote, which is why every line on the receipt carries the est. tag.

Method

editorial, set by hand

City breaks set

14 September 2026

Nature spots set

12 September 2026

Near-home breaks set

30 June 2026

Used for

the stay, daily living and flight lines on every receipt, and the budget verdict

Known limit: these bands have no external source to re-verify them against, unlike the entry rules. They are the first thing that will be wrong in a year, which is why they are dated here and tagged est. on every line.

City breaks

29 destinations

Nature and camping

55 spots

Near-home breaks

98 trips

Who chose them

our editors, with a bias towards lesser-known places a student can afford

Coordinates

OpenStreetMap Nominatim, used to keep a place inside the country whose entry rules it is judged by

Quiet or crowded. The crowd meter on a card is an editorial call, not a measured arrivals figure. Our editors judged the place to be much less visited than the well-known city in the same region, and cheaper for it. It is an opinion, not an arrivals figure. Our editors judged the place to be heavily visited in high season, enough that crowds and prices are part of the trip. It is an opinion, not an arrivals figure. A place with neither flag set has not been rated, and the meter shows its middle state.

The places in the city guide come from OpenStreetMap, read once per country out of a regional extract from Geofabrik and shipped with the app, so using the guide asks a map server for nothing. It covers the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, one file per country, and the table in this section says which extract each file was read from, how old its OpenStreetMap data is and when it was built. It is a selection, not everything OpenStreetMap holds, and it has no ratings and no reviews: places are ordered by how completely they are described in OpenStreetMap and how close they are to the centre of the town. Opening hours are shown exactly as listed on OpenStreetMap, which can be years out of date, so check before you go.

Source

OpenStreetMap contributors

Licence

Open Database Licence (ODbL) 1.0

Read from

one Geofabrik extract per country, named in the table in this section

Covers

640 cities, towns and villages in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany (504 of them smaller than a city), 10 kinds of place, 48,554 places in all

Used for

the city guide only. It never touches an entry verdict or a cost estimate.

Place data (c) OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence. Our selection of it is offered under the same licence, and here it is: each country's row in the table in this section links its download, the same data the app itself reads, as one JSON file, or in parts where a country's file is too large to send in one go. Every file says inside it which country it covers, which licence it is under and how old its OpenStreetMap data is, so a saved copy still says so.

Known limit: OpenStreetMap is written by volunteers, so a thinly mapped town looks emptier than it is, and a place that closed last year can still be listed. A category with nothing in it says so plainly rather than showing a filler entry. The guide holds the larger towns of each country and a short list of smaller ones chosen by hand, not every town there is: a town it does not hold is answered by a live look-around instead, and the town counts in the table are exactly what each file holds.

The places to bowl, play billiards, darts or padel, do an escape room, swim, climb, ride a horse, dance or go clubbing that the app lists near a town come from OpenStreetMap, like the city guide, read once per country out of a Geofabrik extract and shipped with the app, so looking for them asks a map server for nothing. It covers the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany for now. It is a selection with no ratings and no reviews: in each town, places are kept in order of how completely OpenStreetMap describes them and how close they are to the town centre, at most ten of each kind, and a list shows them nearest first. Gambling, adult venues, cannabis, private clubs and places for small children are left out. Opening hours are shown exactly as listed on OpenStreetMap, which can be years out of date, so check before you go.

Source

OpenStreetMap contributors

Licence

Open Database Licence (ODbL) 1.0

Read from

one Geofabrik extract per country, like the city guide

Covers

Netherlands: 5,061 places near 158 of its 158 guide towns, OpenStreetMap data as of 20 September 2026, built 30 September 2026Belgium: 2,824 places near 168 of its 169 guide towns, OpenStreetMap data as of 22 September 2026, built 30 September 2026Germany: 12,927 places near 313 of its 313 guide towns, OpenStreetMap data as of 28 September 2026, built 30 September 2026 (a different extract from the city guide's for Germany, which has data as of 21 September 2026)

Download

Netherlands, one JSON fileBelgium, one JSON fileGermany, one JSON file

Used for

the places to play and go out near a town, and nothing else. It never touches an entry verdict or a cost estimate.

Photos

from Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata, only CC0, public domain, CC BY or CC BY-SA, each credited under its place with its author and licence

Example photos

where no free photo shows the place itself: one photo per kind of activity, labelled Example photo. It shows the activity, not the venue.

Place data (c) OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence. Our selection of it is offered under the same licence: each country's file is linked above, the same data the app itself reads, and says inside it which licence it is under and how old its OpenStreetMap data is.

The photos are not OpenStreetMap and are not in the download above. A photo of a place is only used when it provably shows that place, under the same rules as the guide's photos below. Photos on Google Maps under each place is a link we build: it opens Google Maps in a new tab, where Google shows its own photos. The app never asks Google for anything and never copies its photos.

Known limit: OpenStreetMap is written by volunteers, so a thinly mapped town looks emptier than it is, a place that closed last year can still be listed, and a sports club's courts are often open to members only even when the map does not say so.

The photo on a city and the short line under a place are not OpenStreetMap. They come from Wikidata, which is CC0, and from Wikimedia Commons, where every photo carries its own licence. That is why they are kept in their own file and why the author and the licence are printed under each photo rather than once at the bottom: on a CC BY-SA photo that credit is the licence, not decoration.

Description source

Wikidata

Description licence

CC0 1.0

Photo source

Wikimedia Commons

Photo licence

one per photo, shown under it

Collected

Netherlands: 21 September 2026; Belgium: 28 September 2026; Germany: 28 September 2026

City photos

435 of the 640 cities and towns have one

Place photos

7,209 collected, for the places that have a Wikidata entry

Photos in all

7,644 collected

Descriptions

10,510 one-line descriptions collected

Licences

5,723 CC BY-SA, 963 CC BY, 958 Public domain or CC0

Not used

anything that is not CC0, public domain, CC BY or CC BY-SA. A photo we may not show simply leaves the row without a picture.

Photos load straight from Wikimedia's own servers; we do not copy them onto ours. A description is Wikidata's one line about the place and is never a review: nothing in the guide is rated by anybody.

Known limit: only a place with a Wikidata entry can have a photo here, which is a small share of the guide, so most rows are text. The photo rules follow each country's law. In the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany alike, freedom of panorama stops at the door, so a photo of a museum's interior or of its collection is dropped rather than shown. German freedom of panorama does not cover aerial or drone photos either, and for Belgium we found no clear answer, so aerial and drone photos are dropped for both. A Belgian photo is used when its page on Wikimedia Commons carries the Belgian freedom-of-panorama template, or when what it shows needs no such permission: nature, a view of a town, or a building or work old enough to be out of copyright. Anything modern, and any building its page does not date, still needs the template, so many Belgian places have no photo yet. For a country that has no photos yet, the table in the section above says so, and that country's rows are OpenStreetMap text only.

Some places in the guide have one or two sentences under their name with the label Written by AI from Wikipedia. An AI model wrote each one once, before it was published, from the opening of that place's own Wikipedia article, and only from an article whose Wikidata entry is the place's own. A second, different model then checked every sentence against the article; code refused any note with a number the article does not have, a ranking or a word of praise, a price or an opening time; and a review pass read each note against its article. A note that failed any step was left out, so most places have none.

Notes

50 places, 27 with an English note and 39 with a Dutch one

Written

Netherlands: 24 September 2026

Written by

openai/gpt-oss-120b, run on Groq

Checked by

qwen/qwen3.8-27b, run on Groq

Source

the Wikipedia article and the exact version named under each note

Licence

CC BY-SA 4.0, because every note adapts Wikipedia text

A note is never a review and nobody rated anything: it says what the article says, in fewer words. It can still be wrong, as any summary can, which is why each note links to the version of the article it was written from, so you can check it. The notes are kept in a file of their own under their own licence, and they are not part of the OpenStreetMap download above.

Known limit: only places whose article is long enough to say more than the guide row already does can get a note, and the free plan we use to write them allows a few dozen a day, so notes arrive a batch at a time. A country with no notes yet shows none.

Some places in the city guide carry a small mark, Lesser known, with one or two reasons under it. A place gets it when it has real substance (a heritage listing, or Wikipedia articles in many languages, both from Wikidata) while its Wikipedia pages are read relatively little (Wikimedia pageviews over twelve complete months). It is a lean toward places visitors tend to skip, not a rating: nobody reviewed anything, and the number behind the mark is never shown.

A town page can also say how many nights tourists spent in its region per resident in one year, from Eurostat's regional tourism and population statistics, and whether that is fewer than in most regions of the same country.

Places marked

Netherlands: 141; Belgium: 109; Germany: 476

Kinds of place

museums and galleries, sights, theatre and cinema, parks, markets, fun and games; never cafes, places to eat, bars or clubs

Substance

heritage listings and the number of Wikipedia language editions, from Wikidata (CC0)

Attention

Wikipedia page views in the country's own languages and English, from Wikimedia pageviews (CC0)

Page views counted

Netherlands: September 2025 to August 2026; Belgium: September 2025 to August 2026; Germany: September 2025 to August 2026

Tourist pressure

Eurostat tour_occ_nin3 (nights spent in tourist accommodation) and demo_r_pjanaggr3 (population), 2025, read 29 September 2026Nights per resident is calculated by Bilitly: the nights divided by the population on 1 January of the same year.

Towns to regions

each town's region from Wikidata (CC0); in the Netherlands through the municipality's COROP area in CBS, Gebieden in Nederland 2025 (CC BY 4.0)

Eurostat reuse terms

Reuse of statistical data, metadata, publications, and other dissemination tools published on this website for commercial or non-commercial purposes is authorised provided the source is acknowledged.

Built

Netherlands: 29 September 2026; Belgium: 29 September 2026; Germany: 29 September 2026

Visitor counts that Wikidata holds for some places are kept out of the mark on purpose and used only afterwards, to check the mark against them.

Known limit: page views measure reading, not visiting, and a place with no Wikipedia article or no Wikidata entry cannot be marked at all. Nor can a place whose only Wikipedia articles are in languages other than the country's own and English, or whose page views miss a month of the period. A town's region is a Eurostat statistical region, which can be much larger than the town.

Every place photo is someone else's work, hosted on Wikimedia Commons and shown here under its licence. The author, the licence and a link back to the original file page appear under each photo, which is what those licences ask for. These are the photos on the planner cards; the city guide's own photos are counted in its section above.

Source

Wikimedia Commons

Photos in use

175

Licences

130 CC BY-SA, 35 CC BY, 15 Public domain or CC0

Checked

16 September 2026

Not used

stock photos of people. A profile with no photo shows initials, never a bought face.

The map a member pins a postcard onto is drawn from files that ship with the app: country outlines and town names from Natural Earth, projected once when we build the app and then drawn as plain shapes. Far out it shows countries; as you zoom in, it asks Bilitly's own server, and nobody else, for finer outlines and the names of towns, one country at a time. There is no map service behind it, no key and no account, and nobody outside Bilitly learns whose travel map you opened.

Source

Natural Earth: country outlines at 1:110m for the whole world (with 1:50m for the countries the coarser set leaves out), 1:50m once you zoom in, and 1:10m at the closest views

Licence

public domain

Town names

Natural Earth's populated places everywhere. In the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany also the city guide's towns, (c) OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence, in files of their own so every other map file stays public domain. And the planner's own destinations where Natural Earth has no name.

The town lists (ODbL)

NetherlandsBelgiumGermany

Used for

the travel map on a profile, and the small locator on a place page

Known limit: a pin is drawn at its town, never closer. However far you zoom in, the view stops at about 32 km across, and a postcard's dot sits on the town it was pinned in or near, never on the spot itself. Natural Earth names only the larger towns in many countries, so a pin far from any town the map knows is drawn on a grid of about 25 km and named after its country. At the closest view a coastline is drawn to about a kilometre. The list of countries and places under the map is the real answer either way.

OpenStreetMap. Places you search for in the meetup picker are geocoded with Nominatim, and the things to do near a place come from the Overpass API. For one of the towns in the city guide above neither is asked anything: that answer already ships with the app. For anywhere else, a village in the Netherlands, Belgium or Germany that the guide does not cover included, the place name is sent to those two services and to nobody else. So is a name that does not point at exactly one town in the guide, such as Essen, which is a town in both Belgium and Germany, when it arrives without its country: the guide does not guess which one was meant. Map data (c) OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database Licence.

Wikipedia. Thumbnails and short descriptions for nearby spots come from the Wikipedia API, under the licence stated on each file's page.

Travelpayouts and Aviasales. When a cheapest fare is available we show it and label it recent, because it is a cached price seen by another search rather than a live quote for your dates. With no fare available the card falls back to our estimated flight band and says so.

NS (Nederlandse Spoorwegen) Reisinformatie API. For a trip inside the Netherlands we can ask NS for the next journey between two stations: how long it takes, how many changes it has, and the fare NS quotes for it. That row only appears when an NS key is set on our side; with no key the card shows no times and no fares at all, just the links to plan the trip yourself. When a live answer is shown it carries an NS tag and the minute we fetched it, because departures change through the day. The times and fares are NS's, passed through as they came; NS has not checked or approved what we show.

Google Maps links. No data is fetched from Google anywhere in Bilitly. There is no Google key, no map is embedded, and nothing about you is sent to Google until you tap one of these links yourself. The app only builds the official key-less Maps URLs, so “Directions” and “Show on map” simply open Google Maps in a new tab at the place you were reading about. Any distance or time you see there is Google's, not ours, and never enters our cost estimates.

Booking.com, Hostelworld, Viator, GetYourGuide and Omio. We link to search results on these sites; we do not take bookings and we never show a price we did not fetch. The “Book the train or bus” link opens an Omio search for the route you were reading about, with no time and no price of ours attached to it. The Viator link is an affiliate link, so a tour you book after following it pays us a commission, and some other links carry an affiliate tag too; none of that costs you anything or changes what we recommend or in which order.

A wrong entry rule can cost a student a flight, a fine or an entry ban, so we would rather hear about it than not. Tell us the passport, the destination, what the app said and what the official page says, and we will fix the rule and re-date it.

We do not have a public inbox yet, so for now please report errors to whoever shared Bilitly with you. This page will carry an address as soon as there is one to publish.