Ben Lyons is, at heart, an explorer. And when he picks the next destinations – old and new – he wants to take EYOS, the world’s leading expedition company, too, he has two very clear criteria.
“You look where everybody else is, and you go as far away as possible from that,” he says with a laugh.
“That’s the easiest answer. The second part speaks to our ethos as a company: our team is from the field, they have years of operating experience in these remote regions, and we want to go back to the places that we love.”
Let’s get this out the way: it is impossible not to be jealous of Lyons and his team. EYOS’ website is a bucket list destination in itself: images of Antarctic expeditions, scuba diving in Melenesia, an extraordinary shot of a basking shark gently closing on an inflatable raft in the Outer Hebrides. This is experiential travel done right, and Ben – speaking on a video call from his home in Montana – has seen a significant uptick in demand.
“We’ve been banging the drum for ten, fifteen years about how great what’s now called experiential travel is.
“But in the last five years, people have started to catch on, and people are saying ‘you guys were ahead of the curve on this’.”
The pandemic is no doubt part of that: a year and a bit of effectively locked borders has certainly encouraged people to take opportunities where they find them. But for Lyons it’s more than that.
“I don’t think people realised the possibility existed: that you could take a yacht to Antarctica, or you could go heli-skiing off a yacht in Greenland, or you could visit Papua New Guinea comfortably and safely.”
“Antarctica leaves people changed”
Lyons joined EYOS in 2012, a few years after his first experience of Antarctica. In so doing, he left a career with Cunard, where he became the first American hired as an officer for more than two hundred years, serving as the chief officer on the Queen Mary 2. At least one of his former colleagues thought he was “crazy,” for doing it, but he tells me it was a no-brainer.
“What I found was the higher and higher you got in the rank of the ship, the more you were running a small time. And when I went to Antarctica for the first time, my God – the skills of the captain and the bridge officers actually made a difference to the guests’ experience, and it was going back to what you really enjoyed when you went to sea for the first time.”
Ben Lyons (C: Stein Retzlaff)
Lyons still operates as an ice pilot – navigating ships through polar regions – to keep in touch with what brought him so much joy the first time he saw Antarctica. Does it get boring?
“I can tell you with all sincerity that it absolutely does not,” he says.
His guests – first-time and regular – tell him that trips in particular to the polar regions change their outlook, on everything from sustainability to the health of the oceans.
“Sincerely, I one hundred per cent believe Antarctica leaves people changed.
“They were prepared to think it was beautiful, and that it was a fun trip, and what a great experience it was. But they weren’t prepared to come away feeling emotionally changed. I can’t tell you the number of times clients tell me about this connection they felt with the place.”
“Go with the experts”
EYOS’ business model is simple: the company charters private yachts, like the icebreaker Hanse Explorer or the recently refurbished former trawler Scintilla Maris, and takes them to extraordinary places, packing them with world-leading crew and expedition leaders. That latter yacht is unique: effectively a recycled ship with hybrid propulsion, sailing the Arctic this summer.
Some clients have private expeditions – others take a cabin at a time, with more ‘book by the cabin’ expeditions than ever before. These trips don’t come cheap – a cabin for two on the next expedition to Papua New Guinea or Antarctica starts at just north of £50,000 – but EYOS’ expertise in the field gives them a clear competitive advantage, and it’s difficult to put a price on genuinely unique experiences.
A heart-stopping moment aboard the Hanse Explorer’s zodiac on an EYOS trip to Scotland (Credit: Saskia Coulson and Colin Tennant / EYOS)
That expertise came into sharp focus after the 2023 implosion of Oceangate’s Titan submersible on the way to the Titanic. Lyons and others at EYOS knew many of those involved, and emails and documents which emerged after the tragedy revealed that EYOS’ co-founder Rob McCallum had flagged clear concerns with the submersible long before it was lost. Has that disaster changed how Lyons views his work?
“It hasn’t changed anything for us. (Safety) is what we’ve been about since the inception of the company. It hasn’t changed one iota: we are going to be diligent with our analysis. What it has done perhaps is open the eyes to consumers of the need for expertise.
“Expeditions are what we’ve been doing our whole lives,” he says. “I’m a firm believer that when you go to these remote destinations, you go with the experts – people who live and breathe this.”