For decades, it’s been a rite of passage. Go to a country, get another stamp in your passport. Personally, I’ve loved it, and the reality that fewer and fewer countries are stamping passports in favor of electronic entry makes me a little sad. But some still do, and for that I’m grateful.
There are, of course, some countries where people might be hesitant to get stamps. During the decades when U.S. citizens were banned from going to Cuba, some still visited by going through Canada or other countries. Those people usually requested that they not get a Cuba stamp on their passports, for fear of what could happen when they returned to the U.S. Others chose not get stamps from some Middle Eastern countries for fear of not being allowed into other Middle Eastern countries. Israel hasn’t stamped passports for years; they give you an entry visa on a piece of paper.
That said, there are some stamps you probably should never get in your passport.
Souvenir stamps
When you go to certain tourist attractions—especially parks, temples, and historic sites—there will sometimes be vendors who will, for a fee (of course), stamp your passport with a souvenir stamp.
There are just 3 problems with them:
- Your passport is an official government document, and when it’s marked for any non-official purpose (like collecting a souvenir stamp), you’re technically defacing or altering it. The chances are minimal, but legally, you could potentially go to jail for marking up a passport with things that shouldn’t be there.
- Some countries (or just a border worker with a stick up their nether regions) could potentially not allow you to enter because your passport has been defaced or altered with unofficial stamps. They could also deny you a visa.
- The U.S. no longer issues extra pages for passports. So if you run out of pages, you have to order a new passport—even if it hasn’t expired yet. That’s another reason not to fill your passport up with unofficial stamps: you’ll have to spend money on a whole new passport.
Again, with the increased use of RFID chips to scan passports when entering a country, stamping your passport is already becoming less and less of a “thing.” Regardless of how that goes, souvenir stamps can be fun to get and are a nice reminder of your trip. Just don’t put them in your passport. Some people buy a notebook specifically for their souvenir stamps, and it works out great.
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