Tourism Antarctica

Tourism in Antarctica started by the sea in the sixties. Air flights from Antarctica began in the 1970s with tourist aircraft flights from Australia and New Zealand, and resumed in the 1990s. The tour season (summer) lasts from November to March. Most of the estimated 14,762 visitors to Antarctica in 1999-2000 were on maritime cruises. During the 2009-2010 tourist season, more than 37,000 people visited Antarctica.
Cruises by the sea

The expedition ship National Geographic Explorer
During the 1920s, a mail boat from the Falkland Islands, the SS Fleurus, made annual trips to the South Shetland Islands and the South Orkney Islands to serve the whaling and sealing stations. It carried a small number of commercial passengers and commercialized round-trip "tourist tickets"; These were probably the first commercial tourists to sail to Antarctica. [3]

The modern cruise expedition was started by Lars-Eric Lindblad; In 1969, he launched the MS Lindblad Explorer, a specially designed liner. [4] Many of the maritime cruises depart from Ushuaia in Argentina. Ocean cruises generally last between 10 days and 3 weeks and costs start at around US $ 6,000 per person for shared hosting booths.

There are limited maritime cruises to the regions of Antarctica in the Ross Sea and East Antarctica (Commonwealth Bay). The travel company of the New Zealand expedition, Heritage Expeditions, operates its own polar research vessel reinforced with ice, the "Spirit of Enderby", in these regions several times a year.

Occasionally, very large cruises have visited Antarctica with more than 950 people. These vessels are usually cruise ships and do not offer landings. However, in 2009, new regulations were implemented that prevented large vessels from operating in Antarctic waters due to their heavier fuels. Normally, boats can only disembark 100 people at a time and those that transport more than 500 people can not disembark.

Panoramic flights

A Basler BT-67 owned by the Antarctic Logistics Center International and used for tourist flights in Antarctica, at the South Pole in December 2009.
Most of the scenic flights to Antarctica have been organized from Australia and New Zealand, and airlines from both countries started flights in February 1977. Most flights are simple return trips, and in no case have they landed on the Antarctica.

The first panoramic flight of Air New Zealand took place on February 15, 1977 and was followed by five more that year, then four in 1978 and 1979. The flights were operated with McDonnell-Douglas DC-10 and left Auckland, flying over the Ross Island for McMurdo Sound before returning to Auckland with a fuel stop in Christchurch. Subsequent flights flew in the middle of the Sound and on the Scott Base instead of on the Ross Island, as the plane could descend to a low altitude to provide better visibility for the passengers [note 1]. Many flights took experienced Antarctic investigators as guides, including on at least one occasion to Sir Edmund Hillary, and lasted approximately 12 hours with approximately four of them on or near the Antarctic continent. Air New Zealand canceled and never resumed its Antarctic flight program after the disaster of the TE901 [note 2], where a route planning error caused the aircraft to crash into Mount Erebus on November 28, 1979 with the loss of the aircraft. 257 lives on board.

Qantas operated his first Antarctic flight on February 13, 1977, a letter organized by businessman Dick Smith Dick Smith. By 1979, twenty-seven flights had transported more than 7,000 passengers. The majority used Boeing 747-200B and flew from Sydney, Melbourne or Perth on one of two "ice" routes. One was along the coast of George V Land to the French base at Adele Land and then back on the Magnetic South Pole. The other went through Oates Land and northern Victoria Land to Cape Washington in the Ross Unit. In 1977, a flight doubled Air New Zealand routes and overflew McMurdo Sound and Mount Erebus. Some shorter flights from Melbourne were also operated by Boeing 707s.  Qantas also canceled its Antarctic program after the TE901 disaster, but finally resumed it in 1994, and continues to operate charter flights in the summer from Sydney, Perth and Melbourne to this day with the Boeing 747-400.

There were also previous panoramic flights, including some from Chile in 1958.

Of yachts
There were private yacht trips in the Southern Ocean since the late 1960s, with some tours of Antarctica, for example. by David Henry Lewis in 1972.