Are you really helping when you join an 'expedition tour'?

The golden age of the package holiday is over, and tourism's final frontier has fled from the frozen poles to the vacuum of outer space. But among the shifting trends of the 21st Century, there's one key factor that's increasingly driving people's desire to travel: the spirit of scientific enquiry.

Expeditions used to be the preserve of professionals: scientists, academics and explorers setting off for parts unknown with the goal of furthering the field of human knowledge. An emerging industry of expedition tourism, however, is laying open the thrill of discovery to the general public, with companies offering expert-led tours with a focus on subjects such as science, conservation and anthropology.

"People don't just want to sit on a beach anymore – there's more of an appetite for self-fulfilment," said Kevin Currie, director of New Scientist Discovery Tours. "We launched in June 2019, at a time when experiential tours were growing at twice the rate of normal tourism. That's resumed since the pandemic; we're seeing exponential growth."

New Scientist Discovery Tours are accompanied by experts in their fields, who lead visits to conservation areas, historical sites or scientific institutions, explaining to guests in depth what it is that they're seeing and experiencing. Current tours include a trip to CERN in Switzerland with a particle physicist, and a cruise to Svalbard featuring on-board lectures from world-famous evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.

Currie believes that travel becomes a deeper experience when the place you're visiting is illuminated by expert knowledge. "Anyone can visit Prague, and it's lovely. But an expert-led astronomy tour of Prague, through the eyes of [historic astronomers] Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe, really brings it to life."

Many of the new breed of expedition tours include a citizen science element, extending the scope of the trip beyond mere tourism and giving guests the opportunity to participate in surveying, laying camera traps and other accessible science activities that can be carried out by the general public.

Exodus Adventure Travels offers guests the opportunity to collect DNA samples in the field, which contribute to global biodiversity survey eBio Atlas; while Hurtigruten Expeditions sells trips to Norway that offer guests the chance to contribute to Aurorasaurus, a crowd-sourced database of information tracking the Northern Lights. Hurtigruten also encourages travellers on their trips worldwide to submit their birdwatching photographs to eBird, an online database of bird sightings. 

All of which raises the question: how useful to scientific endeavour can a tourist really be?

Currie is sceptical about the usefulness of citizen science activities being offered as part of an expedition tour. "I'm a little bit cynical about citizen science being used as a marketing tool – about how much of the data is actually going towards the development of science," he said. "We want people to understand how science works; that's why we run science workshops on our tours. But scientific research itself is a serious endeavour. We don't want to belittle it."

Other experts are concerned that some expedition tours are causing more damage to the environment than they can possibly help to resolve. Elina Hutton, a researcher in climate tourism at the University of Lapland, told me that Arctic cruises are particularly at fault in this regard. "They cause more problems than they solve," she said. "Trips that incorporate hands-on science, and lectures on science, are better than those that don't have the scientists there at all. But when we're increasing tourism with the pretext of studying nature, it tips the overall balance towards the negative." 

Hutton believes that stricter guidelines, and the enforcement of them, are needed for Arctic cruises going forward. "There need to be more restrictions on how many people can go, and how close they can get to wildlife," she said. "The Association of Arctic Expedition Cruise Operators have guidelines, but there's no way to monitor if they're being followed. When you look at the marketing photos the tour companies use, they show very close encounters with wildlife, which creates expectation on the part of the customer – they expect to get close to a polar bear mother and her young, for example."

Some experts, however, are optimistic about the potential benefits of citizen science tourism. A 2023 review by a group of academics from Australia concluded that citizen science is proving to be a reliable and useful source of data for scientific research, which is "just as unbiased and accurate as that produced by scientists" – even accounting for the problems that tourists can face when gathering data, such as accurately judging the size and age of animals. 

The study also suggests that tourists who have a background of knowledge in a certain field (without being professional experts) are particularly useful, using the examples of holidaying birdwatchers, anglers and scuba divers: "Research reveals that recreational divers can be effective citizen scientists due to their reported ability to identify and estimate the abundance of marine species with considerable accuracy, even if they have limited scientific experience." The study concludes that, when done right, citizen science tourism can not only gather useful data, but can empower participants to take further action, which positively impacts conservation going forward.

This is a significant factor in the future of sustainable travel: tourism, when carried out responsibly, has a crucial role to play in capturing the hearts and minds of the general public in relation to environmental and sustainability issues.

According to Megan Epler Wood, an expert in sustainable tourism at Cornell University, trips with a citizen science element can help to engage members of the public with conservation issues in ways that traditional holidays can't.

"In places like the Caribbean, they're tired of seeing people who don't care about their ecosystems – they want to just sit on the beach. There are a huge number of places there that could involve citizen science," she said, adding that 80–90% of tourists "don't care about sustainability, period. So if we can inch the number of those that do care forward just another 1%, that would be hundreds of millions of dollars going towards places that need it."

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Epler Wood notes that conservation-minded tours can also bring huge benefits to fragile natural environments by bringing new opportunities to the Indigenous people that call them home. "Specialist tour operators leading expeditions to natural areas frequently have a very important role in the conservation of natural resources," she said. "I worked in the Amazon, where we would find protected areas being taken over by [local] people who needed farmland. As a result, you saw the Amazon burning. So Ecuador, Colombia and Peru all implemented tourism projects where they would employ or set up joint ventures with Indigenous people and create a conservation ethic. It gives the local people a new way of looking at where they live – there are many examples of people who were poachers who became tour guides, for example."

The main issue, she added, is not tourism per se, but the sheer volume of tourists. "The places that are being overwhelmed have to reconsider how many people they're letting in," she said, pointing to Rwanda as one of the best examples of 'high value, low volume' tourism. "They limit the numbers who can see the mountain gorillas. There's rigorous science going on at Dian Fossey's Karisoke Research Center, monitoring and protecting these species, which sits hand in glove with tourists going to these designated areas at designated times."

Clearly, there are a number of challenges that must be addressed to make sure that the growing field of expedition tourism does not further damage the very things it claims it wants to protect. But for proponents of this kind of tourism, travelling in the spirit of scientific discovery can change the way you look at the world, instilling a sense of awe that can empower you to take environmental action – and which you don't need to travel to distant climes to experience.

"We want to be as inclusive as possible. Not everyone can afford a polar cruise," said Currie. "Lots of people associate awe with scale – seeing a huge glacier that takes a day to walk past – but it can also be found in the small, detailed, things, like spotting tiny mosses or fungi. We did a 'science of rewilding' weekend recently; a lot of people want to learn what they can do in their own patch of the world. You don't need to fly to go on an expedition."

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