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Founded | 1954 |
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Location |
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Members | 1,400+ |
Website | travelerscenturyclub |
The Travelers' Century Club, or TCC, is a club for people who have visited 100 or more of the world's countries and territories.
The organization was founded in California in 1954 and now has more than 1,400 members throughout the world. [2] The club has twenty-one regional chapters in the United States, and one each in Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Korea, Spain, and the United Kingdom. [3] It holds regular meetings and provides other tools for social networking. [4]
The TCC maintains a list of countries and territories by which initial membership and milestone recognition is determined. The list includes not only sovereign states but also certain territories, exclaves and island groups. As of January 2022, the list contains 330 such countries and territories. The club literature notes that "although some are not actually countries in their own right, they have been included because they are removed from the parent country", [5] based on rules established in 1970. [6] The designation of what qualifies to be on the list is very roughly based on the amateur radio DXCC award criteria for working 100 "entities." Islands which are part of countries are counted separately if they’re more than 200 miles from land or have a population exceeding 100,000 and are administered as distinctively separate state(s), province(s), or department(s). Under these criteria, the large Canadian island of Newfoundland (with a population of 500,000) doesn't qualify, as it is politically part of Newfoundland and Labrador, a province which is also partially on the Canadian mainland. [6]
The club has no requirements as to how long the traveler must have stayed in a country to qualify. Anyone who has visited 100 or more of the places on the list is eligible to join.
The 330 countries and territories are categorized under 12 different world regions: Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean, Central America, Europe & Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, Middle East, North America, Pacific Ocean and South America. [7] [6]
In 2004, club member Charles Veley was featured in the UK's The Daily Telegraph [12] as the new holder of the Guinness world record for World's Most Travelled Man, but this was never reflected in the Guinness Book of World Records . Instead Guinness retired the category citing lack of an objective standard for the title. [13] [14] Some world travelers dispute Veley's claim to be the new World's Most Traveled Man. [8] [15]