You an now book a trip to the Titanic as if you were booking a - very expensive - package holiday. Photo / Titanic Expedition, Oceangate
You an now book a trip to the Titanic as if you were booking a - very expensive - package holiday. Photo / Titanic Expedition, Oceangate
The three most recognisable words in the English language are Coca-Cola, God and Titanic. In that order.
So said marine insurer and author Admiral John Lang. Of course Lang had a vested interest in keeping maritime disasters front of mind. The doomed vessel was the perfect advert for insurers. Even the 'unsinkable' 2000-passenger liner took out a $5 million policy.
In April 1912 she struck an iceberg on her maiden voyage, killing 1500 and sealing her fate as the world's most famous shipwreck.
Today there is a new group who are eager to keep the RMS Titanic's star status: tourism operators.
The most tragic shipwreck is now a destination for rich adventure tourists. One company is charging visitors $250,000 for the privilege of diving 3800m beneath the Atlantic in a state-of-the-art submarine.
Titanic Dive Team 1 pose with submersible Titan. Photo / OceanGate, Supplied
Last year subsea oceanographic company OceanGate began advertising for euphemistically termed "mission specialists" to join their summer expeditions. The manned submersible saved seats for these "specialists" on their NOAA-accredited outing to the Titanic dive site. In effect, they were funding the mission by freeing up a space for paying tourists.
The main qualifications for the aforementioned "specialists" were being super wealthy, and really into shipwrecks.
This year they have dropped all pretence. Launching the Visit Titanic website last month, you can now buy a package holiday to the wreck in the same way you would book a - very expensive - expedition holiday.
There are departures from May through June next year.
The 8-day expedition includes meals, accommodation and a trip from beautiful Newfoundland, Canada. Airfares from New Zealand are extra.
Currently, OceanGate is charging quarter-of-a-million dollars for the privilege.
A trip has the same cost as a ticket on Virgin Galactic's orbital space missions and that's no coincidence.
"There will be a time when people will go to space for less cost and very regularly. I think the same thing is going to happen going under water," Stockton Rush, CEO of the expedition, recently told the BBC.
The Titanic can now be visited in a state of the art submersible, the Titan. Photo / Screenshot, OceanGate
He wants to do the same thing for the Titanic that Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson are doing for space tourism. Only OceanGate has already had more success than many of these space tourism propositions.
Having taken their first tourists, there are plenty of happy testimonies from the ships' first paying tourists since 1912.
"Visiting the Titanic, it's something you can do. It's accessible to regular people," said one. With 18 planned dives over this year, the visitors have returned to the surface with glowing reviews and haunting stories of seeing the ship, the ocean floor and broken chandeliers.
The tourists may be essentially passengers on the OceanGate submersible, but there is real science being done.
Each mission is scanning the ship to a laser map to create a 3D model of the shipwreck, which is rapidly deteriorating. Since first being discovered in 1985 by a French-American expedition led by Robert Ballard the 30-metre foremast has collapsed.
The new Titanic tourists are funding the mission to document the final phase of the 110-year-old wreck.
No items or materials can be taken from the Titanic, which is a listed grave site for the thousands lost in the sinking.
However, some feel that even visiting the shipwreck violates its sanctity as a maritime grave.
In 2003, Ed Kamuda, then the president of the Titanic Historical Society, told The Associated Press that human activity, including tourism and expeditions, needs to be limited. He said the site should be a simple maritime memorial and left alone.
"Let nature take back what is hers," he said. "It's only a matter of time before it's a brown stain and a collection of pig iron on the ocean floor."
This only makes it a more attractive prize for wealthy tourists. Soon the Titanic will be indistinguishable from the ocean bed but the name will remain. Right after God and Coca-Cola.
Visitors were injured at the half-scale replica of the Titanic at a Tennessee Museum. Photo / Getty Images
Titanic attractions
Today the wreck is a tourist destination in its own right, but the Titanic is the ship that launched a thousand attractions. Some are national treasures others are as much of a disaster as the maiden voyage.
There is even a Titanic ship-shaped 'love hotel' in Tokyo.
It may surprise you to know that there is a replica Titanic in landlocked Tennessee. Last year three visitors were injured after a model iceberg collapsed on visitors. Despite this, the Titanic museum remains one of the town's most successful attractions, just behind Dolly Parton's Dollywood theme park.
This is of course not to be confused with the Titanic Museum, Missouri.
The most popular Titanic-related museum is found in the Belfast docklands. Located in the old shipyards, the OG Titanic attraction has brought almost 900,000 visitors a year to Northern Ireland and more specifically to the former Harland & Wolff shipyard.
Australian billionaire Clive Palmer launched plans to build Titanic II. Photo / File
The most unfortunate Titanic attraction - so far - has to be the Romandisea Titanic in China.
Built in landlocked Daying County, Sichuan it is more white elephant than White Star Lines.
The $200 million full-scale replica was commissioned to be built for the centenary of the Titanic disaster in 2012. Ten years on it is yet to be finished.
An opening date has not yet been set.
A similarly mysterious Titanic project, which sunk without a trace, was announced by Australian billionaire Clive Palmer. Palmer's Blue Star Line said that it would be sailing a full-scale replica of the ship named Titanic II along the ill-fated Liverpool to New York route in 2022.
The ship never materialised. Which is probably for the best.
