Cruises, flights, and days at sea

How no-country days behave

• Flights — the photo scan drops shots taken above 5,000 m, so photos out the window don’t create visits to countries you overflew. GPS tracking generally has nothing to log mid-flight; the crossing day itself counts in departure and arrival countries, as most rules expect.
• At sea — with no signal there are no location events, and days offshore simply record nothing. In the calendar they show as gaps — which, for sea days, is often the correct answer: leave them empty rather than filling them, and no counter counts them anywhere.
• Near the coast — a phone within reach of shore towers may still resolve to the coastal country. Port calls count as visits (that’s right — you docked); spurious coastal days are worth correcting manually.

Cruising the Schengen area

The classic cruiser question: do sea days count against the 90/180 budget? Broadly, days genuinely outside member-state territory don’t consume Schengen days, while port days do — but the counting for multi-stop itineraries has real nuance (territorial waters, same-day ports). Practical approach: let port calls record as visits, keep open-sea days as gaps, and correct any day the automatic record attributes wrongly. For the rule itself, see the Rulebook — and for a high-stakes count, confirm your itinerary’s treatment with the operator or an advisor.

Practical setup for a long voyage

• Take a geotagged photo at each port — it gives every landfall photographic evidence even where GPS was off.
• After the trip, review the calendar once: fill days that should count, leave sea days empty, fix any coastal misattribution.
• Special territories exist (Svalbard is administered by Norway but outside Schengen) — where a distinction like that matters to your count, adjust those days manually and tell us; region handling improves from exactly these reports.