I keep track of everywhere I’ve spent the night in a lodging log on my local computer.
My lodging log, viewed in QGIS in February 2026.
Basemap © Mapbox © OpenStreetMap (Improve this map)
This originally started as tracking my hotel stays in a spreadsheet. I started including stays with friends and family as well, and eventually included every home I’ve ever lived in. With this data, for any given night in my life, I can determine where I spent the night.1
Each stay location and home includes geographic coordinates and the cities and metro areas, so I can create maps of where I’ve stayed, or calculate my distance from home on any given night.
Technical Details
My lodging log is stored in multiple layers of a single GeoPackage file, as described in Lodging Data Structure. I edit the data using QGIS.
I wrote a lodging_data_utils Python repository, with a number of scripts for compiling data from the lodging log. I use this data to create charts and maps, such as for my Year in Travel posts.
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This even includes edge cases like overnight flights and crossing the international date line. See the Overnight Flights section of my lodging log documentation for details on how I encode these. ↩︎