Club connections: Enhance your travel with reciprocal clubs

Taking advantage of NPC’s reciprocal clubs can add an extra dimension to travels in the United States or overseas.

The time my wife Darlene Shields and I spent exploring and enjoying lunch at Hong Kong’s Foreign Correspondents’[OK] Club(FCC) was one of the highlights of our recent 10-day trip to the city.

Like the NPC, photos and plaques on the FCC's walls tell of some of the momentous events club members have covered. Journalists in China during World War II founded the FCC in 1943 in Chongquing, the capital of the part of China controlled by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party. After moving to various cities in China, the FCC found a permanent home in Hong Kong in 1949 when the Communists took over mainland China.

Many of the photos on the walls and an exhibit of Vietnamese war photos by the late Horst Faas attested to the FCC’s role as a respite from the war for many of those covering it.

Today many journalists reporting from China visit Hong Kong, which is one of Asia’s major business cities, as part of their itineraries or are based there.

NPC member Karen Thuermer says: “While in Hong Kong conducting interviews for various magazines, I found the FCC a great place to have a meal and share a drink with other journalists visiting from elsewhere in the world. I also frequently used their media room in the lower level where I could write articles, check email, and print out materials. It became my office away from home.”

Like the NPC, the FCC has a bar, a restaurant, meeting rooms, regular speakers, places for journalists to work, and even offers souvenirs for sale. We bought a tie, umbrella, hat, tote bag, a few reporters' notebooks with the FCC logo, and some other items.

Most NPC reciprocal clubs are not such “full-service” press clubs, but they are worth looking into when you’re planning a trip.

Darlene and I learned to find out what a reciprocal club offers during our 2008 trip to London. We arrived at the London Press Club’s address to find only a small office with one man working there.

While we enjoyed talking with the club manager, we were expecting a British version of the NPC with walls lined with mementoes of Fleet Street’s heyday as the center of Great Britain’s newspaper world.

We planned our trip to London for the Royal Wedding in April 2011 by making a reservation for lunch at the reciprocal St James’s Club on the wedding day. The St. James’s is not a typical press club. Rather it's a luxury hotel and high-end restaurant only a few blocks from The Mall. It was a perfect refuge from the crowds lining The Mall for the procession to Buckingham Palace. We enjoyed an extremely good (and pricey) lunch and watched the wedding procession on the Club’s telly.

Our trip planning now includes checking the NPC’s Reciprocal Clubs listed here.