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. The club has twenty regional chapters in the U.S., two in Canada, and one each in the UK, Germany, and Spain. It holds regular meetings and provides other tools for social networking.
Membership eligibility and the list
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 December 2019, the list contains 329 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", based on rules established in 1970. The designation of what qualifies to be on the list is very roughly based on the amateur radioDXCC award criteria for working 100 "entities." 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.
Records
By 2018, twenty-four members had visited every place on the list. John Clouse, from Evansville, Indiana, was the first to travel to all of the organization's listed countries and was recognized by the 1995 Guinness World Records as "the world's most traveled man" taking the title from another TCC Club member Parke G. Thompson.
The youngest to join the club was Lani Shea, whose parents Jeff and Novita from Novato, California, reported that she reached her 100th country at an age of two years and eight months. She also set a new Guinness World Record under the category of "Youngest person to travel to all seven continents", accomplished in December 2003 when she was two years and 307 days. The record is currently held by Vaidehi Thirrupathy.
Charles Veley from San Francisco in 2003 became the youngest person, at 37, to visit all countries and territories, having visited all but about 70 countries in just over three years.
Controversies
In 2004, club member Charles Veley was featured in the UK's The Daily Telegraph 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. Some world travelers dispute Veley's claim to be the new World's Most Traveled Man.
