The Titanic Sub and the Draw of Extreme Tourism
Diving to the bottom of the ocean is risky. So is flying to space. But people will keep paying to do both.
The submersible craft’s journey to the bottom of the ocean and back was supposed to take about eight hours. Two and a half hours for the descent, a few hours to explore the century-old wreckage of the Titanic, and then another two and a half hours to return to the surface.
But the sub and its five passengers have now been missing in the Atlantic Ocean for three days. In that period, it has had no communication with the rest of the world. American and Canadian crews are searching the sea for any sign of the vessel, and time is against them. According to a U.S. Coast Guard official, the submersible has a finite supply of emergency oxygen, which is dwindling by the hour. What began as an adventure has turned into a frantic rescue operation.
The voyage, as grim as it seems now, is one of many treacherous tourism options for the wealthy. The lost submersible, named Titan, belongs to OceanGate Expeditions, a research and tourism company specializing in deep-sea excursions, which has charged $250,000 for a ticket to the Titanic. Wealthy adventurers could also pay hundreds of thousands to fly to the edge of space, or millions to orbit the Earth. When traveling to such dangerous, exotic environments, disaster is always a risk. And yet, people pay considerable money to take it on.
As the rescue efforts continue, details about the submersible experience have emerged. The expensive voyage is far from luxurious. David Pogue, a CBS journalist who traveled on the submersible last year, recently called the cramped vehicle, with as much room inside as a minivan, “janky.” Before he boarded, Pogue signed a waiver that described Titan as an “experimental submersible vessel that has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body and could result in physical injury, disability, emotional trauma, or death.” The New York Times reported today that a few dozen submersible experts, oceanographers, and deep-sea explorers wrote a letter in 2018 to OceanGate’s CEO—who is on board the missing vessel—expressing concern about the safety of the sub.
People still signed up, of course. The reason some human beings are drawn to such extreme tourism is rather straightforward, if slightly unsatisfying: They’re just like that. “We’re all wired a little bit differently,” James Petrick, a professor at Texas A&M University who studies tourist behavior, told me. Researchers categorize travelers and their motivations along a spectrum: On one end are the risk-averse psychocentrics, who travel least often and to familiar spots. On the other end are the risk-embracing allocentrics, who travel often and are more adventurous. Most people fall somewhere in the middle, Petrick said: “You may go on a vacation and bungee jump, but you want the comforts of your hotel room the rest of the time.”
Adding to Titan’s appeal was the submersible’s destination, the site of the most famous shipwreck in history, where more than 1,500 people perished. Visiting such gruesome places is part of a phenomenon known as “dark tourism.” Countless visitors travel to the sites of concentration camps, battlefields, and Ground Zero. Dark tourism brings out “something that we all have in common, which is our demise,” says J. John Lennon, a tourism professor at Glasgow Caledonian University, in Scotland, who coined the term with a colleague. “The means and method of that demise seem to exert an enduring fascination over many of us.” (Again, some of us are just like that.)
Tours of places such as Auschwitz can have historical and educational value; OceanGate says that every deep-sea dive involves some scientific research, and passengers are given the title of “mission specialist.” But the real draw is obvious in this now-deleted marketing line: “Become one of the few to see the Titanic with your own eyes.” The narrative surrounding the Titanic as an “unsinkable” ship further shrouds the wreckage in intrigue, turning a trip to the depths into “something between learning and voyeurism,” Lennon told me. Petrick wondered whether, as awful as it sounds, the story of the missing submersible might make the deep-sea location even more appealing for potential travelers.
Most can’t afford a $250,000 submersible trip, or any of the other kinds of travel popular with the ultra-wealthy. Consider space tourism, which is finally becoming routine after years of anticipation. A ride to the edge of space with Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson’s space company, costs $450,000. Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin hasn’t publicly divulged its prices for its own edge-of-space trip, but one seat seems to have gone for $1.25 million. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which takes passengers into orbit and to the International Space Station, charges many more millions. Flying to space is becoming as much of a status symbol as climbing Mount Everest, and the spacefarer club is much more exclusive. “If you can go a step further than the pack, if you can do something more daring, intriguing, and enigmatic than the others—and if it’s photogenic—all the better,” Lennon said.
For those who can afford it, the draw of high-risk adventure is, apparently, irresistible. Among the five passengers on the OceanGate submersible is Hamish Harding, an aviation businessman and seasoned adventurer, who has set a diving record in the Mariana Trench and traveled to Antarctica with Buzz Aldrin. Last summer, before he joined the submersible voyage, Harding was a passenger on Blue Origin.