![]() ![]() So far, there are a handful of ways to book this type of trip. The industry’s wares are just starting to become accessible to luxury leisure travelers. Of those, about 25 to 30 are on private yachts. Where submersibles used to be limited to research and government use, there are now about 200 worldwide that are not for military use, Kohnen explains. Other leisure sub manufacturers include Triton Submarines, which declined to comment for this story. ![]() They are the ultimate yacht toy, ranging from a two-person capsule for €590,000 ($646,000) to a nine-person model (€6 million), each capable of descending about 1,000 meters. U-Boat Worx’s vessels are luxury products, after all. “We have to see the longer-term effects, but business is continuing here as normal," he explains, adding that the demand for personal submersibles (and pilot training courses) has been growing in recent years. But so far, he says he hasn’t seen cancellations. Its clients include Seabourn Cruises, Viking Cruises and Scenic Luxury Cruises & Tours. People are asking questions as a result of the Titan’s implosion, says Erik Hasselman, commercial director at Netherlands-based U-Boat Worx, whose submersibles have been used since 2009 on board private yachts, and since 2016 by luxury cruise lines. Yacht, cruise and luxury operators in the submersible business understand this distinction, Kohnen explains. The submersible industry is otherwise strictly regulated by government-approved bodies, or “classification societies," that are technical experts in ship safety in the US and abroad. flying -approved airplane," Kohnen says in reference to the now well-publicized fact that OceanGate’s Titan sub operation was an outlier in lacking certification. “There’s a difference between flying an experimental airplane vs. The company’s two-person crewed vessels were initially conceived for research and tourism, offering hour-long trips off the coast of California. “No one has yet said, ‘Submersible tourism is a bad idea, let’s cancel it,’" says Charles Kohnen, co-founder of the pioneering, California-based, SEAmagine Hydrospace Corp. SEAmagine revolutionized the traditional submarine industry in the 1990s when Kohnen and his co-founding brother William, both engineers, designed and built the first known personal submersibles. Titan was intended to descend four times as far. Personal submersibles are used widely by cruise lines, yacht operators and a small number of tourist sub operations to explore pristine coastlines, arctic waters and coral reefs. They rarely achieve depths greater than 1,000 meters-3,280 feet. In 2023, submersible tourism has become more common that it might sound. ![]()
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