You can't cURL a Border
An error fare to Iceland pops up. It's cheap enough to feel like a typo and most likely will be gone in minutes. I'm moderately obsessed with ways to travel on budget, so I keep an eye on these.
Before I click Buy, I need to know (fast!) if it actually works for me: would I need a visa, are there any odd passport requirements, can I quickly sort out the driving permit, would it affect my Schengen 90/180 window, break UK presence tests or accidentally prevent a tax residency I am chasing.
It isn’t one check, it’s a stack of small unfriendly ones, and takes around 20 minutes to process. Some bits are fun, like hunting for a seat upgrade, but mostly it’s counting midnights and expiry dates so a cheap weekend doesn’t become an expensive lesson.
I've been doing this dance for a decade now. In 2015 I made a spreadsheet for a US visa application that wanted ten years of travel history, down to the day. The spreadsheet grew: UK work visa, Indefinite Leave to Remain and citizenship applications, Canadian work permits. Any government form that asked "where have you been?" got its answer from the same battered CSV. It worked well enough, in the sense that I was never detained.
It also made me think that this was a solvable problem I was solving badly. I built a ledger to answer “where was I on 15 March 2023?” Instead, I ran simulations to check, “if I book this, what breaks later?”
The only question is whether the computer can answer all of faster than I do, and leave December, the next border control, and the end of the tax year blissfully uneventful.
Does this trip compile? ¶
That twenty-minute panic before buying a flight comes from one basic problem: none of the systems that judge you will tell you your state.
Schengen is running one check. The UK is running another. Tax residency is running a third. Your passport is running its own quiet clock in the background. None of them explain themselves, and none of them agree on what “a day” even is.
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