Most of us are aware that airports and international train stations aren’t the cleanest of areas. This is because a high number of people are touching the same items and areas daily, but you might be surprised to discover the dirtiest thing you will bring back from your travels.
At JRPass.com, we like to bring you the most up-to-date travel research to help you have the best possible experience, so our expects ran a controlled lab experiment to find out exactly which travel items carry the most bacteria when you arrive home from your holiday - and the results were surprising. While most of the items on the list we expect to be dirty, there’s one object in parrticular that most of us haven’t thought twice about carrying germs and that’s your passport.
How we ran the experiment
In February 2026, we ran a petri-dish microbial culture experiment using nutrient agar (a food gel for growing bacteria and fungi) to identify which travel items carry the highest levels of bacteria when brought back into the home.
Samples were collected from six commonly used travel items: coats, mobile phones, hand luggage, shoes, hold luggage and passports. Three individual items from each category were tested to ensure consistency. Each item was swabbed using sterile cotton buds at key contact points. The swabs were then transferred onto nutrient agar plates and incubated for eight days to allow bacterial colonies to grow and become measurable.
Contact points tested:
• Passport: front, back and both ID pages
• Hold luggage: handles, zip, wheels, front and bottom
• Shoes: laces, top, sides and sole
• Hand luggage: handles, straps, zip, front and bottom
• Phone: screen, back, sides, crevices in phone case and buttons
• Coat: zip, collar, front, back and pockets
Following incubation, visible colonies were counted and recorded as colony forming units (CFU) per 3cm², providing a comparative indication of bacterial load across each category. Note: bacterial and fungal counts may be lower than actually present, as some microbes cannot grow on nutrient agar.
Which travel items are the dirtiest?
Six commonly handled travel items were swabbed and tested using nutrient agar cultures. Here’s how they ranked by bacterial load, measured in colony forming units (CFU) per 3cm²:
The passport registered 436 colony forming units which was more than four times the bacterial count of hold luggage, and nearly seven times that of shoes. Given how often passports are handled, by you, border agents, and airline staff, the finding makes intuitive sense, but the scale of the difference is striking.
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Why passports are such a hotspot for bacteria
“Our hands are well known to be very well colonised by the bacteria and fungi that normally live there. The greater the handling of a passport by different people’s hands, the more and greater the variety of bacteria, fungi and even viruses will be deposited onto the surface.” - Dr Primrose Freestone, Associate Professor in Clinical Microbiology, University of Leicester
Simple ways to reduce germs while travelling
1. Wash your hands regularly
Airports and public transport are high-contact environments, meaning hands easily pick up microbes from surfaces like check-in kiosks, handrails and luggage. Washing hands thoroughly with soap and water, or using an alcohol-based gel, is one of the simplest and most effective things you can do.
2. Wipe down your passport and phone
Items handled repeatedly during a journey accumulate microbes transferred from hands and surfaces. Wiping your passport cover, phone screen and luggage handles with antibacterial or alcohol wipes can help limit what makes it back into your home.
3. Change out of your travel clothes
Clothing naturally collects microbes from your skin and the environments you move through. Changing out of your airport outfit and washing it promptly after travel can prevent those microbes from transferring onto furniture, bedding and household surfaces.
4. Leave shoes at the door
Footwear can carry bacteria and fungi from both your skin and the environments you’ve walked through during travel. Leaving shoes by the front door and avoiding wearing them inside helps reduce the spread of outdoor microbes across your floors and carpets.
5. Wipe down your luggage before storing it
Suitcases and hand luggage come into contact with airport floors, conveyor belts and public surfaces throughout your journey. A quick wipe of the exterior before putting them away can minimise how much of that microbial load ends up in your home.
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