You’re a journalist… You should be able to work out what happens when someone overstays a visa ( hint: you won’t be allowed to return to the EU in x number of years) Also there’s a chance overstaying a visa will get you barred from other countries.

is there a reason you can’t just follow the law? zone hopping is not difficult. i’ve been doing it in europe for the last 10 years. i’ve never overstayed or needed to.

I don’t think you’re going to find anyone who had overstayed because people don’t mess around with Schengen (just as they wouldn’t mess around in the US).

Maybe you can source some horror stories from like r/travel or something, I think most people on this sub know the correct limits when it comes to these things.

And as everyone else has already said I would absolutely not risk this for an extended vacation. This isn’t SEA or Argentina. Lots of other non-Schengen places you can go to.

While we’re discussing this — does shengen have an automated calculator?

Pretty sure we still need to manually tally up our visits, but I know there was talk of having everything digitally tracked. An online calculator (SMS alerts) would be dope. (Especially now that a lot of Schengen countries don’t stamp your passport anymore — so it can be very hard to tell how long you were there for various stays.)