Travel Club For Seniors

The Travelers’ Century Club 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 2,000 members throughout the world. Senior travelers, count up the number of countries where you have been and make a comparison with this list.

By 2012, nineteen 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. Senior travelers want to be called a “Hard Core Traveler” to be counted among the membership.

The Travelers’ Century Club has sixteen regional chapters in the U.S., two in Canada, and one each in the UK and Germany. It holds regular meetings and arranges tours to remote destinations. So what’s the most remote place you have visited? The idea of “collecting countries” can be an inviting challenge to senior world travelers. The only app you need is called Passport.

Seniors Seek Adventure and Exploration

The Travelers’ Century Club motto is–”World travel…the passport to peace through understanding.” Members come from diverse backgrounds, but all love adventure and exploration and have a special zeal for life. They truly believe that knowledge about other cultures and countries promotes peace. Many of the members are senior citizens who have done much of their traveling after retirement.

Membership in Travelers’ Century Club comes in different levels. Those who have traveled to 100-149 countries qualify for regular membership, 150-199 countries silver membership, 200-249 countries gold membership, 250-299 platinum membership, and over 300 are diamond members.

The club sponsors tours to out-of-the-way places like Northwest Passage, Central Asia (the “Stan” countries), West Africa, the World Heritage sites of North Africa and so forth. The most recent countries added to the list of qualifiers are Prince Edward Island, Nakhichevan, Srpska (northern Bosnia), Kosovo, and Trans-Dniester (between Chisinau/Odessa). So do you qualify here?

Membership is a great way to hang with like-minded people such as Christopher Hudson, who has ticked off 249 of the 321 countries, territories, protectorates and islands. So start counting and see how you compare.

As for me, I can only count up to twenty countries to date, but I do have a few left on my “travel bucket list”. Dick Matland, president of Coronado Shores Co., has traveled to enough destinations to qualify for the Travelers’ Century Club two times over.  So go for it and have fun filling up the old passport with lots of stamps.  jeb