With the cruise industry taking a big tourism hit in recent weeks and months thanks to the ongoing issues at Carnival, up in Antarctica, people are finally coming back after the financial crisis halted what had been a burgeoning industry.
These tourists aren't just retired seniors watching birds and penguins from the confines of the ship's deck, they are younger people wanting an inland experience or adventure seekers looking to skydive and scuba dive under the nonstop-sunlit skies of a Southern Hemisphere summer.
"What used to be Antarctic tourism in the late '80s through the '90s was generally people of middle age or older going on cruises and small ships where they went ashore at a few locations and they looked at wildlife, historic sites and maybe visited one current station," said Alan Hemmings, an environmental consultant on polar regions.. "But there's an increasing diversification of the activities now so it's much more action orientated. Now people want to go paragliding, waterskiing, diving or a variety of other things," according to USA Today.
Even with the risk of doing these activities, for example, the USA Today report that "two Americans and an Austrian died skydiving in 1997 near the U.S. Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station at the geographic South Pole," "Antarctic tourism has grown from fewer than 2,000 visitors a year in the 1980s to more than 46,000 in 2007-08," according to USA Today.
Though, those numbers fell, bottoming out at fewer than 27,000 in 2011-12, the Rhode Island-based International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators, according to USA Today, estimates close to 35,000 visitors came this season, which runs from November through March. That number is expected to grow exponentially with the industry group predicting a rise in tourist-numbers next summer and the summer after that.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
