2025 Travel Stats: Flights, Hotels & Miles

I’ve always liked keeping track of things. Flights. Hotels. Countries. Miles. Not because I’m trying to gamify life, but because the numbers tell their own story. Some things like the Flights become a need - just to know what I'm doing. They capture a busy year in a way memory never quite can. After a time that one "trip" just becomes a blur. When I look back, I don’t just remember places all the time.

Where I Actually Spent My Time

Let’s start with the simple bit: where I physically was.

According to the Country Days Tracker app I spent 306 days in the UK this year, which works out at 84% of the year. For someone who talks a lot about airports and boarding passes, that number might surprise people. It surprised me a little. Because from the inside, the year felt busy. But the data says: yes, busy but perhaps not as busy as I felt.

Outside the UK, I spent 40 days inside the Schengen zone and 14 days in the United States, with a few extra days in Ireland and Saudi Arabia.

But the key thing isn’t the totals — it’s the pattern of the sort of travel that I was doing. .

Those Schengen days weren’t long stretches. They were short hops to Germany, Spain, Denmark, Norway, France, Italy and the Netherlands. In and out. Work, meetings, dinner and then home again.

It wasn’t a year of disappearing abroad, sadly mostly it was 24 hours at the most....

If there’s one location that features more than any other in my life, it’s Heathrow.

19 airport visits this year were to LHR alone.

Which basically means Terminal 5 is now my second home....

London City came next (5 times), with Paris CDG, Gatwick and Stansted tied at four visits each. Frankfurt, Aarhus and Amsterdam made quieter appearances lower down the list.

There’s something oddly comforting about becoming a regular in a airport. Same corridors. Same Lounge. Same boarding gate areas. A kind of anonymous familiarity.

I’m sure that’s weird but at the same time it's also quite comforting.

Then there are the hotel rooms.

This year I slept in 58 different hotel rooms. Well officially it's 56 hotel rooms, and 2 overnight flights but...

Which finally justifies the strange little project I started doing this year — photographing every hotel room door number. Scroll through the photos and it’s just numbers: 405, 318, 523, 164… A few repeat numbers as well just to be thrown in for good measure.

Each one is a night in a different bed. Now the 58 different rooms didn't equate to only 58 nights away. Sadly it was much more than that.... but each was a different city. A different version of the same routine.

Check in. Keycard. Wi-Fi code. Where’s breakfast? Where’s the lift? Where do the runners in this city go? Of course (although I didn't track it) the majority of my stays were with IHG hotels.

You learn that hotels are mostly the same (especially if it's a Holiday Inn express)— and completely different at the same time.

The stat I’m quietly happiest about:

389.3 km run this year — up 137% from last year. By the time the year will have ended it will be over 400km.

Running became the one thread that stayed consistent even when everything else changed around me. I ran in London. I ran in Europe. I ran across time zones. Sometimes very early. Sometimes jet-lagged. Sometimes because I genuinely wanted to. Sometimes because I knew I’d feel worse if I didn’t. Even if there was a lot of travel in the year, I still tried my hardest to run. I didn't always achieve it but still...

So that was the year on the road: 39 flights, 24 airports, 58 hotel rooms, and 400 kilometres of running squeezed in between check-ins and boarding calls. A steady rotation of security trays, lukewarm coffees, gate changes, hotel pillows of wildly inconsistent quality, and the familiar “have I packed my charger?” moment at least twice a week. Europe kept pulling me back, Heathrow did most of the heavy lifting, and somehow the running shoes made it into the bag every time. Nothing dramatic. No grand narrative. Just a year built from small journeys, simple routines, and the satisfying feeling of always having somewhere to be next.

What’s Next?

And next year? Probably more of the same — a few new routes, a couple of old favourites, at least one airport sprint I definitely didn’t plan, and a steady supply of hotel keycards that I absolutely don’t mean to collect but somehow still end up with. The suitcase will stay half-packed, the running shoes will keep travelling in the overhead locker, and Heathrow will continue acting like my unofficial second home.