Where our data comes from

The short version

Nothing here is an official decision

Gardesh 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.

Entry rules

The base visa dataset

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 Feb 2026 (7 months ago)
We downloaded it: 15 Sep 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 Feb 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.

Entry rules

Our own rules, and the official pages behind them

On top of the dataset, Gardesh 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 Sep 2026. Every card links the page behind its own verdict.

Money

Visa fees

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.

Money

Cost bands: how the rest of the receipt is set

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 Sep 2026
Nature spots set: 12 Sep 2026
Near-home breaks set: 30 Jun 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.

Places

The places we recommend

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.

Places

Photos

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.

Source: Wikimedia Commons
Photos in use: 175
Licences: 130 CC BY-SA, 35 CC BY, 15 Public domain or CC0
Checked: 16 Sep 2026
Not used: stock photos of people. A profile with no photo shows initials, never a bought face.

Live sources

What we fetch while you plan

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. 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 Gardesh. 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. Some links carry an affiliate tag, which costs you nothing and does not change what we recommend or in which order.

Corrections

Found something wrong?

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 Gardesh with you. This page will carry an address as soon as there is one to publish.