The unfolding incident involving five people aboard a missing submersible is nightmare fuel: The Titan set out on Sunday in the North Atlantic and was supposed to take its passengers to visit the shipwreck of the Titanic, as it has done several times before. But it lost contact shortly into the journey, and according to the latest reports, the search for the submersible—which reportedly counts OceanGate Expeditions CEO Stockton Rush among the passengers—is still ongoing.
For many of us, boarding a small vessel in order to go deep into the ocean in the first place would be an automatic no; even under the best of conditions, submersibles and submarines are small and cramped and, again, very much under the water. But plenty of people pay good money to take trips in them. For fun!
The truly flush can purchase their own “superyacht submersible” from Triton Submarines, which counts director James Cameron as an investor. The sea vehicles come with your choice of real or vegan leather seats, a custom paint job, plus “pilot and operator training for you and up to five of your crew.” The prices aren’t listed on the website—a submarine is a real “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it” kind of item—but they are reportedly in the $2.5 to $40 million range.
Victor Vescovo, a Guinness Book of World Records hall of famer in his own right for his deep dives—turned his highly custom Triton vehicle into a business, charging passengers $750,000 for trips to the Mariana Trench starting in 2020. The Limiting Factor, as the vehicle was named, was the first designed to taxi passengers to the deepest point in the ocean. The expedition’s leader described it to The Points Guy as a “cocoon of titanium,” promising any prospective ticket holders a calm experience. But even an expensive trip in a luxury submarine is still … a trip in a submarine (well, technically, in this case: a deep-submergence vehicle). “Passengers should prepare to be in a very confined, pitch-dark space for hours,” a Bloomberg piece on Vescovo’s business explained. “Bathroom facilities consist of special bags and bottles.”
Vescovo has since sold Limiting Factor to a scientific operation, but Outside magazine credits him with shifting the landscape of deep ocean travel, which has slowly but surely been catching up to outer space in terms of rich-person tourism. OceanGate Expeditions—the company that has now lost its passengers—started offering regular dives to the site of the Titanic wreck last summer for a comparative bargain of $250,000. “It’s a new type of travel,” OceanGate CEO Rush told CBS News’ David Pogue. Pogue got a free seat on the sub when he reported on the experience.
Submarine tourism experiences aren’t just for journalists and the megarich. According to a brochure from Triton aimed at folks looking to get into the business, the “global tourist submersible sector” sees about a million passengers per year, albeit most of them not nearly as daredevilish as the Limiting Factor or Titan passengers. Some of these trips are excursions tacked on to luxury cruises, like a 1,000-foot-deep trip aboard the air-conditioned Scenic Neptune submarine, offered by Scenic Luxury Cruises and Tours. Others are a little more gimmicky: In 2019, Uber partnered with Queensland Tourism in Australia to briefly offer “scUber,” an hour-long submarine ride experience around the Great Barrier Reef. For a stretch of a few weeks, scUbers could be booked for (just!) $2,000 for two passengers.
But the top submarine tour in the United States, according to a search on Tripadvisor, will run you about as much as an afternoon of parasailing, at just $171.31 per adult. The Maui Atlantis Submarine Adventure allows up to 48 guests at a time to “explore the spectacular seafloor without getting wet,” and one recent traveler even called it “spacious” and “roomy,” at least, for a submarine. (Judge for yourself.) It’s run by a company called Atlantis Adventures, which has been operating passenger submarines since the ’80s. Sure, going to depths of 100 feet or so, as this sub does, while listening to a tour guide crack dad jokes might not be as exciting as traveling to a shipwreck on the ocean floor that very few human beings have seen. But for the average person, that seems most desirable: a submarine trip that’s, well, slightly boring.
