 "Adventure Travel")
Ephrat Livni, Ravi Mattu & Michael J de la Merced
The tragic deaths of five people on a tour to see the Titanic shipwreck this week have put the risks of extreme travel into focus. But despite the dangers, travel to out-there locations like the South Pole, remote mountaintops, shark-infested waters and space is becoming more popular.
Adventure tourism is expected to bring in more than $1 trillion of revenue globally by 2030, up from an expected $316.6 billion in 2022, according to the market research firm Grand View Research.
And as interest grows, so, too, will the number of search and rescue missions, says Mikki Hastings, president of the National Association for Search and Rescue. “Whether it’s space or Everest, every person deserves to be found,” she said.
The number of businesses aiming to mitigate the danger and potential emergency costs of extreme travel are starting to rise. Some offer rescue and medical evacuation from remote locations. Others are working out new types of insurance policies for pursuits like space travel.
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Traditional travel insurance won’t swoop in with paramedics, even though it typically covers the cost of an emergency. Dan Richards, the chief executive of Global Rescue, told DealBook that he wanted to fill that gap when he founded the emergency travel management company in 2004. For a $360 annual fee, it provides members with evacuation services. Upgrades, including one that promises “military special operations veterans” will retrieve you from dangerous locations like war zones, can raise the fee to about $1,800. Similarly, Medjet, a medical evacuation service, sells annual memberships, and companies like AirMed International, SkyMed and others offer emergency extractions.
Travel insurance is going to space. With companies like Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic selling tickets for trips, the market for space tourism is expected to grow to about $3 billion by 2030, according to estimates from UBS. The space travel insurance market is still small, but Lloyd’s of London, which insures space businesses, began underwriting space travel insurance in 2021, and last year the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance said they would jointly develop space insurance offerings.
Taxpayers will end up footing the bill for some rescues. The cost of search and rescue typically falls on state and local agencies, Ms. Hastings said. About a half-dozen states have laws that allow agencies to charge a rescue recipient, though few do, and there is no cost to those rescued by the federal park services, for example. Last year, lawmakers from Hawaii and Utah introduced legislation to allocate federal funds to help states pay for search and rescue operations, a burden that the drafters said disproportionately fell on less populous places, but the bill failed to gain traction.
The search for the submersible this week most likely cost millions of dollars. The Coast Guard, which led the rescue effort, has jurisdiction over search and rescue in navigable waters in the United States and beyond. “But that’s just the definition of their mission,” Ms. Hastings argues. “We don’t encourage charging for search and rescue because we want people to seek help regardless of socioeconomic status.”
Mr. Richards said a client of Global Rescue had signed up for the Titan trip this week, but withdrew his deposit because of safety concerns. Though his team would have worked with international rescuers if the customer had followed through with his plans, the company would not have had the requisite deep sea capabilities. There are some journeys where risk can’t really be mitigated yet, he said, adding, “If there’s an emergency in space, no one will be able to necessarily reach people.”
