In May we verified every fact in our 82 published country guides. In August we checked them all again: 54 needed corrections. Fees, portals, one war, one relocated Grand Prix, and three errors that were ours.
Our when-to-visit guides cover 199 countries; 82 are published and fact-checked. All 82 were verified in mid-May. This week we re-verified every one of them against current sources, claim by claim: entry rules, fees, portals, advisories, event dates.
Fifty-four needed corrections. That is 66% of the catalog, rotten in about 90 days.
None of it was typos. What follows is the taxonomy of what actually breaks in a travel guide in one quarter, with the receipts, because the same rot is sitting in whatever 2024 listicle you last read.
Prices moved (upward, every time)
Zambia doubled its visa-on-arrival on January 1: single-entry $25 to $50, double-entry $40 to $80. Ethiopia's 30-day e-visa went $52 to $62, and its old $72 90-day multi-entry option quietly stopped existing. The Louvre now charges non-EU visitors €32. The UK's ETA hit £20 in April, and the US ESTA has been $40 since September.
Not one price in the entire pass moved down. We charted this ratchet in detail in the toll-booth piece; the May-to-August delta just confirmed the direction.
Systems moved (and left dead links behind)
Ghana discontinued visa-on-arrival entirely on May 25 and moved to a new e-visa portal, with a free ETA for African Union nationals. Cameroon's e-visa stopped being "intermittent" and became mandatory. Mauritania's advance-application system turned out to have started in January 2025, a full year earlier than we'd written.
Our Togo guide pointed to an e-visa portal that no longer exists. The correct domain is voyage.gouv.tg; the one we listed resolves to nothing. A dead official link is worse than no link, because the page that fills the gap is usually a middleman charging triple. Finding one of those in our own guide was uncomfortable in a useful way.
Geopolitics moved fastest of all
The single strangest correction: the 2026 Bahrain Grand Prix is no longer in Bahrain. After the April race was cancelled over the war with Iran, F1 and the FIA relocated it to Sepang, Malaysia for October 4, still under the Bahrain Grand Prix name. Our Bahrain guide was telling readers to book March hotels early for a race that will run 6,500 km away.
Also in this category: Gabon and the US suspended visa issuance to each other's citizens on January 1. Guinea and Gabon both inaugurated presidents, ending their transition governments and easing their advisory levels. Sudan's displacement figure passed 14 million.
Rules moved in both directions, which surprised me
The ratchet applies to fees, not to rules. Myanmar partially restored visa-on-arrival for four Asian nationalities. Kenya dropped its eTA for most African passports. Mongolia extended its 30-day waiver for some 60 nationalities through 2026, with Americans getting 90 days.
And Thailand produced the most instructive correction in the whole pass: the Cabinet approved cutting visa-free from 93 countries at 60 days to 54 countries at 30, and slashing visa-on-arrival from 31 nationalities to 4 — but the change has not been gazetted, so the old rules are still in force. Half the travel sites we checked report the cut as done. It isn't. "Approved" and "in effect" are different columns, and a guide that merges them is wrong in the most confident possible way.
Three errors were ours
Full disclosure column. Our Gambia guide said US citizens enter visa-free for 90 days like UK and EU passports; in fact Americans need a roughly $100 visa-on-arrival valid only 28 days. Our Timor-Leste guide referenced an e-visa system that does not exist (it's $30 cash at the border, and the airport has no currency exchange). And our US guide still quoted the ESTA at $21 in two places, a year after it went to $40.
We wrote those, we found those, we fixed those. Most sites skip all three steps.
The half-life math
66% drift in 13 weeks means the accuracy of an unmaintained country guide decays on roughly a one-quarter half-life. A guide last touched in early 2025 has been through five of those cycles. This is why every one of our country pages carries its verification date in the structured data search engines read, why the visa matrix recomputes monthly, and why the only advice that survives contact with a border is: check when the thing you're reading was last verified, then check your specific passport-destination pair in the visa checker anyway.
The next full re-verification runs in September. Based on this one, we expect about half of it to be necessary.
Method: all 82 published guides re-verified 2026-08-01 to 2026-08-08, 2–3 highest-volatility claims per guide checked against primary sources; 54 guides corrected, 28 confirmed accurate. Corrections are live in the guides themselves.