Titan Incident Has Sparked Interest in Extreme Adventure Travel

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re likely aware of the details surrounding that submersible…ya know, the one that went missing en route to the Titanic and was later found to have imploded, killing five people in the process. New fear officially unlocked.

That said, the reality is this: the overwhelming majority of us are at zero risk of dying in a submersible at the bottom of the ocean, because we will never be in a submersible at the bottom of the ocean. Most of us are, after all, not billionaires. But as fate would have it, the Titan incident has had a seemingly inverse effect on actual billionaires.

According to a report from Insider, it’s sparked more of an interest in extreme adventure travel among especially well-heeled travelers. Per the founder of bespoke luxury trip curator Brown and Hudson, Philippe Brown, the company has seen a “marked increase” in interest in the company’s “high-level memberships” and “terrestrial projects.” No one has cancelled any upcoming extreme travel plans, either.

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“People have got in touch recently as a result of this tragedy, not specifically about Titanic, but about other things,” Brown said. “Tragedies sometimes generate interest in other areas of extreme travel.”

Apparently, not even interest in visiting the Titanic wreckage specifically has tapered off. Brown told Insider that the phenomenon is “a perfectly normal thing and accidents will not stop it.”

“People still fly when planes go down. They’ll take helicopters when there are helicopter accidents,” he said. “Mankind just moves forward, hopefully in a slightly more educated way and more risk-aware in some cases.” Though, the argument could certainly be made that people flying on planes and people venturing 12,500 feet below the surface of the ocean in a small, limited-range watercraft is not a one-to-one comparison.

Then again, as CBS News recently reported, this year the Nepalese government has granted a record number of permits to climb Mount Everest, in spite of an uptick in deaths that’s put 2023 on track to be one of the deadliest in history, which lends itself well to the theory that the very real threat of death is not enough to deter people from seeking out (and paying a lot of money for) extreme adventure travel experiences. It may actually even inspire it.