Living in London, I travel to Europe frequently, but stay no more than a week or two each time.

Since I now have a lot of stamps in my passport I’m increasingly getting questions from border guards about how much time I’ve spent in the Schengen area, and if I’m familiar with the 90/180 day rule.

Sometimes they spend a good 5-10 minutes checking all the dates on stamps. It doesn’t help that some border agents have stamped the departure in a different page to the corresponding entry, so it can appear like I’ve spent much longer on a trip than I really have.

Is there a good way to prepare for these questions and speed up the process? Should I try to calculate the number of days and offer that information proactively?

It’s not a huge hassle but the delay can be the difference of making a train or bus on arrival, or less time in the lounge on departure. Also I feel bad holding up people in the queue behind me.

An exel sheet (printed) with all travel dates to/from EU in the last 180 days, indicating for each stay the page on which the corresponding entry/exit stamps are located.

The immigration officers are the ones holding up the queue, not you.

I've seen a business traveller get the border agents to stamp his passport as well as a separate piece of paper with a table of dates.

Not that it mattered to me other than I just like to see how things go with passport control when keeping packed up the trump documents in case of a fuss as a third country national at Schengen passport control, but I used to keep a table to show that I was keeping track of 90 out of rolling 180 day limits. Showing the tables and even suggesting showing the table tracker sometimes attracted more scrutiny than just verbally telling them where the latest Schengen passport control stamp was for me and that I am leaving so as to not exceed 90 days in any 180 day period if they happened to be digging through each of the pages looking at stamps/dates.

Back when I was a road warrior (and my home country wasn't in the EU), one time in ZRH they actually took me to an office aside to check the stamps. I gave them my passport and wished them good luck - at the time a passport would usually last me about a year until full. All my stays were short and a lot of them not in Schengen, so I was definitely not overstaying, but tracking all the stamps in a full passport... after 20 minutes, they gave up 😂 I feel whatever you tell them upfront, they would still have to check (or at least try their best) themselves.

I keep an excel sheet with all my entry and exit dates but that's for my use.

I wouldn't dream of foisting it on a border official. More likely to generate even more enquiries than the ones I'm trying to suppress.

i'd rather the officer just got on with it and most do after a flick through a few pages and an exasperatedsighover an other officer who hasn't put the exit stamp next to the entry!

This is just a fact of life. Reduced lounge time isn't going to generate a lot of sympathy.!

I'm in a similar boat in terms of the number of stamps. Like others, I have an excel sheet that I keep to ensure that I stay within the 90/180 rule, but have yet to travel with it. Is there a particular jurisdiction where they are taking more interest? E.g. I'm in and out of France a lot, and they don't seem to pay much notice.

On exit from Spain on Saturday, the officer did take a minute flipping through my passport trying to make sense of all the stamps (which of course are scattered throughout the passport rather than neatly done sequentially). Usually they just stamp and go. Of course, when he stamped it, he didn't stamp it beside the entry stamp, so now I have another page turner for the next trip.🙄

It's quite interesting that in my experience, countries with Schengen land borders were much more meticulous about placing the stamps correctly - e.g. Slovenia/Croatia border, I would have these wonderful neat stacks of entry and exit stamps.

I suspect they did not stamp a lot of passports at he Slovenia/Croatia border. Hence they have more time to do it properly.

My passport is filling up thanks to a combination of work trips and holidays. Bizarrely most stamps have been placed in order but I'm sure there is one feint stamp that's been over stamped as I now have an odd line.

I did feel when I entered Montpellier last week that he spent longer than usual going through the pages. But then that may be just to find a space!

Even though some of these trips were less then 24hrs, because they were overnight stays they count as 2 days for the 90 day rule?

Yes Since they have no way of knowing *when* in the day you entered...

Do you have any Irish grandparents?

Any part of a day in the Schengen side/area eats up a day for the purposes of the 90 day limit. So if you clear Schengen entry passport at 11pm today and do Schengen exit passport control two hours later, it counts as two days for this purpose.

France — at CDG at least — has usually been pretty relaxed from what I’ve observed for US, UK, Canadian, Australian and NZ passport users at passport control even when with pages chock full of Schengen stamps. Swedish passport control, however, has been more aggressive about UK passport users than Danish passport control — when it comes to those with UK passports full of Schengen stamps but no documentation allowing stays longer than 90 days in any given 180 day period.

In theory, a stay from 2350hrs to 0010hrs would count as two days out of the 90, but in practice it depends on whether the immigration officer has changed the date on their stamp

I have had two officers stamp me with the incorrect date but as I wasn't planning to spend anywhere close to 90 days it didn't matter. However, the correct date may have been recorded on that country's computer systems which may be revealed on future visits to that particular country.