It happened on an airplane, which figures. Charles Veley always loved to travel. Newly flush from his tech company’s recent IPO, by 2000 he’d gotten his private pilot license and started learning French, German, and Italian. Then he left his Bay Area home on a round-the-world ticket, fantasizing about becoming a sort of globe-trotting James Bond figure—a man cultured and confident enough to order drinks or crack jokes in any bar he walked into.
Mid-trip, at cruising altitude, riffling through an airline mag, Veley spotted a blurb about the Travelers’ Century Club (TCC), a California-based social organization founded in 1954. To join, members had to visit 100 or more of the places on its official list of countries and territories, from the Austral Islands to Zimbabwe. Veley tallied his travels. He didn’t make the cut.
“If you put a list in front of me, I just want to complete it,” says Veley, 59. “That’s really where the light bulb clicked. . . . The next day, my wife and I were scheduled to fly from Seoul to Hong Kong, and I found that we could stop and have lunch in Taipei. I hadn’t been to Taiwan. We did that so I could check a box off a list.”
In coming years, that box-checking would grow into an obsessive lifestyle, then a kind of second career, taking Veley to obscure places such as the uninhabited North Atlantic islet Rockall, and the American exclave of Point Roberts, Washington, which is accessible only via Canada.
Along the way, Veley would help pioneer a new kind of travel, one with rules and points and metrics and increasingly competitive rankings. In the beginning, though, he was simply hungry. “I was just smitten with learning more about the world’s geography,” he says. “It’s like a smorgasbord or buffet table. . . . You want to try one of everything.”
When Los Angeles travelers Bert Hemphill and Russell Davidson started the TCC in Los Angeles, they invited would-be members to count places, not countries. They organized the world—which, in the 1950s, had scarcely more than 100 nations—in a list that considered more than sovereignty. Paris and Papeete, cities that are both part of France but are 9,756 miles apart, would count separately. It’s intuitive even if you’ve never strolled Tahiti’s black-sand beaches. Tahiti is a French overseas territory, but it doesn’t seem like France because the French colonized the originally Polynesian island.
After discovering TCC in 2001, Veley began traveling intensively to complete the club’s official list, which today has swelled to 330 places. Still, Veley thought the list was incomplete. “I thought there ought to be a better list,” he says. The Guinness Book of World Records had recently discontinued its “Most Traveled Person” category; Veley, who’d grown avid for the title, found himself standing on a playing field with big ambitions and no referee.
In 2005 he founded the club Most Traveled People, or MTP, with an expanded “master list” of 573 countries and territories. It’s since grown to 1,500 locations ranging from populous, popular subregions—California has four of them—to remote places unclaimed by any country, such as southwest Antarctica’s wind-whipped Marie Byrd Land. No traveler has visited them all, and it’s possible that none ever will.
On the MTP website, travelers fill out profiles and tick off every place they’ve visited, and the results are tallied on a leaderboard. While there’s no systematic verification of travel claims, MTP occasionally asks members for proof in the form of passport stamps, ticket stubs, and photos. Currently top-ranked on MTP is João Paulo Peixoto, a 60-year-old professor from Portugal who has traveled to 1,369 MTP locations. Veley has visited 1,273, enough to make him the ninth-rated MTP traveler in the world.
Even the longest lists breed dissent, however. Greek South African traveler Harry Mitsidis felt the early MTP list focused too much on detailed breakdowns of popular European destinations (what he called the “easier” countries) while lumping larger but less touristy regions like Cameroon under single listings. In 2012, Mitsidis launched a competing list of 1,221 places on a website, now called NomadMania, which has become the other heavyweight of the competitive travel community.
“[We] divided all the countries, including Cameroon and the Congo, and all the hard ones to go to, and we said, ‘This is now what it means to be a huge traveler,’” he recalls. The main NomadMania list has since grown to 1,301 places and has a competing ranking system based on numerical tallies of locations visited; a verification committee confirms the claims of highly ranked travelers by checking stamps, boarding passes, and other evidence. On his website, Mitsidis, 52, is currently ranked No. 1 in the world.
Some of the world’s record-setting travelers, including Jessica Nabongo (top left), Per Besson (top right), Harry Mitsidis (bottom right), and Thor Pedersen (bottom left).
MTP and NomadMania lists are unusually vast, but list-making is at the heart of modern travel culture. Travel publications have long published numbered lists of destinations they think trend-conscious vacationers should know about, from the New York Times’ annual “52 Places to Go This Year” to a Lonely Planet book itemizing the 500 “best places on the planet.” TikTok’s travel creators rank the magical, the economical, and the downright surreal. (Afar has an annual list of its own.)
Love or hate them, we’re living through a golden age of travel lists, whose devotees span well-heeled retirees on cruising sprees and backpackers hauling patch-covered bags between hostels. A large 2018 study published in the Journal of Palliative Medicine found that 91.2 percent of participants had a bucket list. The most common theme among those lists? A desire to travel.
There’s a lot to be said for a good list, too. Lists help us reconcile big dreams within the real-world constraints of finite time and resources. Research has found that lists can motivate while quieting FOMO’s anxious chatter. The very best travel lists, meanwhile, have the power to translate our deeply held values—exploration, curiosity, challenge—into something that’s quantifiable, motivating, and highly shareable. Also, they’re fun.
“The list was endorphin-inducing—I used to love checking off my little boxes,” says Ugandan American traveler Jessica Nabongo, 40, author of The Catch Me If You Can, a book chronicling her journey to become the first Black woman to visit every country. “When I went to Russia, I was like, ‘Oh my God, look how much of my map has filled in!’” she recalls. Still, Nabongo says she doesn’t think of herself as a competitive traveler. “For me, it was so much bigger than that,” she says. “Since my early twenties, I wanted to visit every country in the world.”
While all country-counting travelers start with 193 United Nations member states as a base, there’s no consensus about the true number of nations. The sovereign state of Kosovo, for example, isn’t on the UN list. Nabongo’s count is 195 countries—the UN list plus Palestine and Vatican City, both UN observer states—but some travelers tally 197 or 198 or even 203 as the countries of the world.
No matter how you count, until recently that UN country list was the big one—a travel list to rule them all. It wasn’t until 1988 that Finnish journalist Rauli Virtanen became the first person to visit every United Nations member state (170 at the time). While visiting every country remains an astonishing feat, it’s also becoming more common. By the end of last year, an estimated 357 people had been to all 193 UN member states—enough to fill a small cruise ship. As their ranks have grown, lists have changed. Travelers seeking to differentiate their achievements must get creative.
In 2013, when Danish traveler Thor Pedersen set out to visit every country without flying, the trip was partly inspired by his realization, at 34 years old, that he’d found a brand-new list. “I discovered something that had never been done,” he says. “I couldn’t believe that in a world where virtually everything has.”
He thought it would take four years, tops. The journey lasted nearly 10. He reached his final country, the Maldives, in May 2023. “What actually did keep me going when I probably should have gone home?” says Pedersen, now 45. The list came to define his identity, he says, providing built-in motivation. “For the better part of a decade, I had this list in front of me, which gradually got shorter and shorter.” I’ve come so far, he thought. I’ve done so much. Don’t stop now.
The MTP and NomadMania lists exert a motivational pull of their own, for certain travelers, at least. Some within the community say that, as a result, they draw visitors to places that might otherwise be overlooked, from the teensy island nation of Nauru to the jungle-furred mountains of southwest Cameroon. And that, argues Mitsidis, can be transformative.
By the time Mitsidis launched NomadMania, he had already visited every country in the world, according to the UN. But he often sped through many African countries, visiting a capital city, then moving on quickly. Creating the NomadMania list inspired him to revisit many countries, especially in Africa, with a more granular focus.
In the years to come he took extended trips to countries he’d rushed the first time around. “I was in the wrong. . . . Now that I’ve been to them again and focused on the regions, I have a much better understanding,” Mitsidis says. “I think the lists have really contributed in that direction.”
Competitive travelers, like Mitsidis, seem to be almost universally avid, open, and eager to see the world. But Veley pointed out that many have another trait in common.
“I call it a collector mentality,” Veley tells me. “People want to collect the whole set.” Years ago, when Veley visited the Indiana home of John Clouse, who most recently held the Guinness World Record for “The World’s Most Traveled Person,” he saw a massive wall displaying rows of pristine baseball hats. Another was stacked to the ceiling with VHS tapes. “He was a complete collector of just about everything,” Veley says.
The TCC website notes that club members may “like to ‘collect’ destinations, as other people collect stamps, paintings, dolls, spoons or coins.” In a paper published last year, Ioannis Kostopoulos, associate professor of digital marketing at the Liverpool Business School, Liverpool John Moores University, compares travelers “collecting” experiences and places to people amassing memorabilia, describing a tendency to chase end results as other priorities fall by the wayside.
Place collectors sometimes put box-ticking over connecting with local communities, Kostopoulos writes. They “show less interest in and care about the destinations they visit and, as such, do not contribute much to [their] environmental and social sustainability.” Such criticism is common, even within the competitive travel world: In a NomadMania poll from earlier this year, some respondents voiced concerns that numerical targets lead to more superficial experiences rather than substantive cultural engagement.
Kostopoulos also found that sharing in peer groups is a big part of place collecting; most people don’t collect in total privacy. Sharing turns travel into “currency to communicate the collector’s achievements,” he writes. In other words, place collectors tend to show off to each other. Even the world’s most traveled people sometimes do it for the likes.
But even those who haven’t visited Nauru or Rockall or Point Roberts may find that relatable. Social media status, numerical metrics, and rankings of all kinds present seductively quantifiable goals. Over time, such goals can subtly influence our more complex values, like the ones that inspire us to leave home to begin with.
“Say someone starts traveling because they like seeing other places—they have that genuine motivation,” says C. Thi Nguyen, a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah, who studies games and communities. “Seeing other places” is inexact, hard to measure. Likes and lists and rankings, on the other hand, can be easily tracked over time.
“The things you care about can be hyper-simplified,” Nguyen says. “Their mind shifts more towards the measure because that’s the measure that’s out there.” Such explicit markers of status and achievement are not new, but they’re relentlessly present in an increasingly online society. “Social media just makes it highly, constantly salient.”
If rankings oversimplify, however, the world itself remains insistently big and complex. Metrics can only take stock of what’s quantifiable, no matter how long the lists they draw on. Lines on the map don’t begin to capture the astonishing diversity of human cultures; places are not baseball cards or coins or stamps. They refuse to sit quietly on the shelf, which is why we can’t even agree on how many countries there are. Plus, traveling has a knack for scrambling our assumptions.
“We think in two dimensions, we arrive in three dimensions,” said American traveler Per Besson, 55, reached while he was on a trip to Nepal. (Besson’s current rankings: No. 37 on MTP, No. 23 on NomadMania.) In other words, there’s more to most places than we imagine before seeing them firsthand.
Has this happened to you? Scanning a map or flipping through a guidebook, you block out the time for your next vacation—two weeks in Germany, say, or three days in Munich. But once you’re there, the trip seems impossibly short. Even weeks of traveling—a vast luxury for most people in the world—won’t be able to taste-test each of Germany’s 1,200 distinct varieties of sausage. Munich alone has some 200 beer gardens. How long would you need to really check the city off your list?
For years, competitive travelers have heard critiques that their list-making rewarded journeys that were fast-moving, heedless of the environment, and unconcerned with nuances of culture. The accusation rankles Mitsidis. “It’s everything a big traveler should not be, basically,” he says. Mitsidis’ response to the critics was to make yet another list.
In the summer of 2023, NomadMania launched Slow, a new ranking system that incentivizes longer stays. With this metric, travelers rack up points based on consecutive days spent in each of 196 countries (that’s the 193 UN member countries plus Kosovo, Taiwan, and Palestine). A high Slow score, Mitsidis says, suggests a more immersive approach to travel.
“It was very difficult to do this because we needed to quantify what is qualitative, and that wasn’t easy,” says Mitsidis. “We wanted to put that into the equation, though. If you really want to be considered a serious traveler, you do need to take time to explore.”
On the Slow list, Misidis is currently ranked No. 44, but that could change. He has some trips coming up.
