A New Study Shows That Your Dirtiest Travel Item Is Not What You Might Think

It’s no secret that your shoes, suitcase and cell phone get extremely dirty when traveling. All of these items come in contact with tons of different surfaces as well as other people’s hands, which contain a ton of germs.

They’re also not cleaned very often, which doesn’t fully help the situation. Recently JrPass, a Japanese rail pass company, conducted an experiment to find out what truly is the dirtiest travel item. Surprisingly, it wasn’t any of the things that most people think of.

In a controlled lab experiment, items like coats, phones, luggage, passports and shoes were tested for bacteria. Each of these items were swabbed and then incubated for eight days.

The results revealed that people’s passports held the most amount of bacteria by a complete landslide. The bacteria was measured in CFU, which is colonies formed per unit. The passports were found to have 436 CFUs, while everything else hit below 100 CFUs. 

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Regular luggage had 97, shoes had 65, hand luggage had 56, phones had 45, and coats had 15. This goes to show that because multiple people touch your passport as you go through various parts of your travel journey, it is simply collecting an impressive amount of bacteria throughout the journey. Plus, people don’t necessarily think to wash their passport like they do other items.

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“Our hands are well known to be very well colonised by the bacteria and fungi (and some viruses) that normally live there,” Dr. Primrose Freestone, an associate professor in clinical microbiology at the University of Leicester, told Travel + Leisure. “This means that, as well as our resident hand skin microbiome, our hands will, when they touch any surface, pick up additional microbes present within the airport environment, which have the microbial deposits from the thousands of people who pass through each day.” As Freestone added, the greater the handling of a passport by different people’s hands, the greater the variety of bacteria, fungi, and even viruses. 

Now that you know this information, think about how many times you’ve stored your plane or train ticket in your passport, opening it over and over to check that it’s there, or handling it when moving throughout your travel day.

Then, in between that, you’ve probably had bites of food and touched your face–giving the bacteria, fungi, and possibly viruses a free ride into your immune system. So, next time you travel, remember to not only sanitize your hands as often as possible, but add wiping down your passport to your cleanliness ritual as well.

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