Elite tourism: ocean immersions, space travel and visits to conflict zones

Submarine dives, trips into space and climbs to the great peaks, including visits to conflict zones or hunting in large natural reservesare part of the call tourism elite, a phenomenon that seeks new and exclusive adventures at high prices.

The disappearance of a submersible with five crew members who were going to see the remains of the Titanic some 600 kilometers southeast of the Newfoundland (Canada) coast, after paying some 229,000 euros per person, has brought back to the fore a trend that in some of its aspects will move billionaire figures, according to specialists.

spacial tourism

Since in 2001 the American billionaire Dennis Tito paid US$20 million (about 17.5 million euros) to the Russian space agency Rocosmos for traveling into space, orbital tourism has become a source of business for companies around the world.

Until 2009 they had traveled beyond the atmosphere seven “tourists” -of them, a woman-, all of them wealthy businessmen who each paid between 16 million and the 35 million of the Canadian Guy Laliberté.

In recent years, private companies such as Blue Origin (Jeff Bezos) and Space X (Elon Musk) have developed space travel projects.

Unlike SpaceX, Blue Origin is mainly dedicated to the more commercial side of orbital travel, that is, entertainment or space tourism. His first flight took place on July 20, 2021, when Bezos took an eleven-minute trip accompanied by his brother Mark, the 82-year-old pilot Wally Funk, and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old Dutch student son of a billionaire who bid in an open auction for the seat in the “New Shepard”.

Another space tourism company is Virgin Galactic, owned by billionaire Richard Branson, who traveled into space aboard the VSS Unity plane – it ascended up to 80 kilometers above the Earth’s surface – on July 11, 2021.

A 2019 report by Swiss financial firm UBS estimates that commercial flights into outer space could become a $23 billion industry by 2030.

Under the sea

The so-called underwater tourism covers a wide range of options: from luxury stays in a submarine with glass walls to diving excursions among archaeological remains of the seabed.

War tourism, conflict and disasters

In war tourism, the attraction consists of reaching areas in the midst of an armed conflict or a natural disaster, or traveling to cities with recent vestiges of these, in search of extreme emotions.

In 2022, Canadian politician Dominic Cardy traveled to Ukraine on his vacation and posted areas that had been bombed and damaged by the Russian army on social media.

Vietnam and some areas of Colombia are other destinations that tourism companies offer to see first-hand the “wounds” of past conflicts.

the great peaks

Reaching the great peaks has become in recent years one more tourist attraction, despite the risks involved in climbing: a high price that can range between 35,000 and 135,000 euros per person.

safari

In February 2020, Botswana, the country with the most elephants in the world, held its first auction of hunting quotas for these pachyderms since lifting the ban on hunting them in May 2019.

Hunting “packages”, of 10 elephants each, could be purchased by Botswana-registered companies able to pay a refundable bond of about US$18,000 (about 16,430 euros).

The ban on trade in African elephant ivory has been in place since 1990, under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

superflow destinations

According to Forbes, which uses May data from the TravelersElixir platform, the three most expensive destinations in the world are the principality of Monaco, the Caribbean island of Saint Bartholomew and Gstaad, the tourist town in the Swiss Alps.

Prepared with information from EFE