I'm always glad when my passport doesn't get stamped. My last one got full a good 3 years before it expired. I was in a sitaution where I didn't have time to wait for pages to be added, the the cost for expedited service was high, so I just got a new 48 pager and started over last fall. So many places that require Visas take a whole page, and with the 10 year passport, if you travel a lot, it gets filled quickly. There has to be a better way than toting around paper and having people rubber stamp and sign things. Have even gotten extra scrutiny (ORD) returning from Europe once because my passport was so full...."you sure do travel a lot, what do you do for a living sir", etc. What BS.

It's a bad system, but the alternative is probably some awful centralized database that will be used to make more nonsensical TSA watch lists, and one day get transferred to a laptop which then will be lost or stolen. For the $82 it costs to get a US passport it should have more pages!

$82 is cheap. Some places cost much more than that, and only valid for 5 years. Not that that matters to me - fill it up quicker than that (and no rule allow extra pages to be added for mine).

I agree Switzerland is tough to get a stamp out of. My wife has a Chinese Passport (bright red mainland one, not the nice Hong Kong or Macau variety) and still didn't get stamped. Countless times across the Canadian border and she didn't get stamped either.

It is like clockwork that a trip to China produces countless stamps for us depending on how many times we cross back and forth into Hong Kong.

I've never asked for a stamp before, I just take them if I get them. I already had to get pages added as a result of the many HK/China stamps plus the full page Chinese visas from each trip. Chinese passports are only for 5 years anyway so hers hasn't been a problem yet, plus they are a little more generous with pages than the US in a new passport.