Is The Future Of Luxury Travel Lighter Than Air?

It certainly seems so. Environmentally conscious travellers with a taste for experiential journeys can soon visit the North Pole in a hybrid blimp.

- Gemma Zoe Price

The characters in Philip Pullman’s fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials explored the Arctic Circle by airship. Soon, well-heeled travellers will do the same.

Almost a century after Roald Amundsen and Lincoln Ellsworth completed the first successful trip to the North Pole aboard dirigible The Norge in May 1926, in 2023/24 experiential travel outfit OceanSky Cruises will offer a 36-hour round trip to the Earth’s northernmost region by a blimp billed as “the superyacht of the sky”, offering eight cabins with queen-sized beds and ensuite bathrooms.

Fittingly, the itinerary departs Svalbard — where the mast for The Norge still stands — and will cruise over Norway’s wilds and Arctic icebergs as passengers use the midnight sun to spot polar bears, breaching whales and rare wildlife below.

OceanSky Cruises CEO and co-founder Carl-Oscar Lawaczeck says it’s the first of many itineraries he will launch to explore remote, hard-to-access places.

“To utilise airships to the maximum, you want [to fly to] an area that doesn’t have so much infrastructure, like the Amazon or Siberia, where it’s hard to get very deep into the wilderness,” he says, adding that he might add in options for passengers to stay overnight at a camp at the Pole or on a deserted island, or be dropped off for an overland dog sledding or 4WD experience to a pick-up point.

Lawaczeck is in talks with several manufacturers, but says the 98-meter-long Airlander 10 — which UK-based manufacturer Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV) says is the largest aircraft in the world — is currently his preferred aircraft.

Airships like Airlander share a number of qualities suited to luxury travel.