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How we compare your travel year

Last updated: October 15, 2026. Every figure below was checked against its source on October 15, 2026.

Your Goafie Status story cards can say things like “More flights than 90% of people on Earth”, “Top 5% of Goafie travelers” or “Beat the US average” for on-time arrivals. This page explains where each claim comes from and the published data behind it.

Conservative by design. Every “people on Earth” number on a Goafie card is a lower bound that published world totals prove. It is not an estimate or a model. The share of people you really beat is almost certainly higher than the card says. Every number is rounded against you. If we can't check a source, the claim that rests on it is switched off.

What counts toward a claim

• One calendar year at a time. World comparisons are only made for a single year, never for your all-time totals.
• Only flights you actually flew. The flight has landed and wasn't cancelled or diverted, and you haven't marked the trip private.
• Flights are counted per leg. Each takeoff-to-landing counts once, which is how ICAO and IATA count passengers. A trip with one connection is two flights.
• Distance is the great-circle distance between the two airports, the same basis airlines use for passenger-kilometers.
• Countries means foreign countries you entered. Your home country doesn't count, and neither does a country where you only changed planes.
• Hotels never get a world comparison. No reliable count of the world's hotel nights exists, so we don't make one up.

“More flights than X% of people on Earth”

We start from world totals that airlines and the UN publish every year, and use a simple rule. If the average person took 0.68 flights, then at most 1 person in 100 can have taken 68 or more. If more people had, they alone would push the average above 0.68. In general, the share of people at or above any number can be at most the average divided by that number. If you're at that number, everyone below it took fewer flights than you.

To keep the claim safe, we make the average bigger than it really is and the bar higher:

• Totals rounded up. We use 5.5 billion flight legs a year. ICAO counted 4.7 billion passengers on scheduled flights in 2024, and IATA expects 5.2 billion in 2026. We use 10.5 trillion passenger-kilometers. ICAO counted 9.1 trillion in 2024. IATA reported 5.3% growth in 2025 and expects 4.9% more in 2026.
• Population rounded down. We divide by 8.1 billion people. The UN puts the world at 8.2 billion in 2024.
• An allowance for people the totals miss. Crew, airline staff flying standby and private-jet flyers aren't in the passenger totals, so we take another 0.1 percentage point off every claim.
• Every threshold rounded up and every percentage rounded down, and no claim goes above 99%.

That works out to at most 0.68 flights, 806 miles (1,297 km) and 0.235 foreign-country visits per person a year. With the allowance and rounding, it takes 76 flights in a year before a card says “more flights than 99% of people on Earth”.

Taking even one flight puts you ahead of at least 80% of people. In a study of 2018, Gössling and Humpe estimated that about 11% of the world's population flew at all that year. Even if every passenger added since then were a first-time flyer, the share would still be far below 20%.

Foreign countries work the same way, using UN Tourism's count of international tourist arrivals: 1.52 billion in 2025. We raise that by a quarter, to 1.9 billion, to cover arrivals that countries don't record. Each arrival counts, so the number of different countries a person visits can't be higher than their number of arrivals.

At 95% or more, a card shows a “Top X% on Earth” badge. From 80% to 90% it says it in words, such as “More flights than 85% of people on Earth”. Below 80% it makes no world claim. One foreign country proves only 75%, which we don't print. Kilometer thresholds are worked out on their own rather than converted from miles, so the two columns can differ by a rounding step.

“N× the average human's flights”

We divide your flights by 0.68, the most flights the average person could have taken in a year, and round down. Three flights is “4×”. The real average is lower, so the real multiple is higher.

Your average flight vs the world's

ICAO's 2024 figures, 9,097,611 million passenger-kilometers over 4,669 million passengers, put the world's average flight at about 1,949 km (1,211 miles). Cards round it to ~1,200 mi or ~1,950 km. We only show the comparison when your own average flight is at least about one and a half times as long.

“Top X% of Goafie travelers”

This compares you with other people who use Goafie, not with the whole world.

• Worked out on our servers once a day. For each calendar year we add up every traveler's flights, distance, hotel nights and countries. Only flights already flown count (not cancelled or diverted), and only hotel nights already spent. Trips marked private are left out. Anyone with at least one flight or stay in that year is included.
• Only the cut-offs are published. The result is a short list of thresholds, such as how many flights it takes to be in the top 1%, 2%, 3%, 5%, 10%, 25% or 50%. It holds no names, no one's totals and no head count. Your phone compares your own numbers with it.
• Small groups are never singled out. A tier is only published when at least 5 travelers are in it. When travelers with the same total sit on both sides of a cut-off, the threshold moves up to the next total, so a tie never lifts anyone into a tier they didn't earn.
• Enough travelers first. You see your rank in the app once at least 50 travelers have logged that year. It goes on a shareable card only once at least 100 have, and only if you're in the top 25%.
• At or above counts. You're in the top X% when your total is at or above that tier's threshold. Never for all-time totals.

On-time comparisons

A flight counts as on time when it arrived less than 15 minutes after its scheduled arrival. We score a flight when we know when it arrived, or when it was cancelled or diverted. Cancelled and diverted flights count as not on time, as they do in the US DOT figures. We compare you only with named, published figures, never with “X% of flights worldwide”, because nobody publishes a worldwide average. Your rate is rounded down to a whole percent and has to be above the benchmark rounded down. To beat the US's 76.34%, you need 77%.

What we don't claim

• No world percentile for hotel nights, delays, on-time rate, airports, airlines or aircraft.
• No model-based estimates. The real thresholds are almost certainly lower than ours, but we only print what the published totals prove.
• No world claims for all-time totals, or for flights you didn't fly.

Sources

Each source was checked on October 15, 2026. We review them every June, when the new annual figures come out.

• UN World Population Prospects 2024 (UN press release, July 11, 2024): 8.2 billion people in 2024.
• ICAO Annual Report 2024: The World of Air Transport in 2024 and its statistical tables: 4,669 million passengers and 9,097,611 million passenger-kilometers on scheduled services in 2024.
• IATA, January 29, 2026: passenger-kilometers up 5.3% in 2025.
• IATA, December 9, 2025: 5.2 billion passengers expected in 2026 (up 4.4% on 2025), and passenger-kilometers up 4.9%.
• Gössling & Humpe (2020), “The global scale, distribution and growth of aviation”, Global Environmental Change 65:102194 (open-access copy): about 11% of people flew in 2018, and at most 4% flew internationally.
• UN Tourism World Tourism Barometer, January 2026 (also in UN Tourism's Asia-Pacific office summary): 1.52 billion international tourist arrivals in 2025, up 4%.
• US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics, on-time performance, 2025: 76.34% of 7,001,619 flights by reporting airlines arrived on time.
• EUROCONTROL, All-Causes Delays to Air Transport in Europe, Annual 2024: 72.4% of flights arrived within 15 minutes of schedule.
• Cirium On-Time Performance Review 2025: Aeroméxico was the most on-time global airline, at 90.02%.

Spotted a number that's out of date or wrong? Tell us at support@goafie.com and we'll fix it, or switch the claim off until we can.