When Luxury Meets Adventure: Amazing Discovery Expeditions for CEOs

Founded a decade ago, Cookson Adventures has always been an innovative enterprise, seeking to push the boundaries of luxury adventure travel. From organising the first manned submersible dive in Antarctica to putting clients at the heart of crucial conservation work in the Galápagos Islands, the company puts luxury at the core of extraordinary journeys. Is it time for you to take an executive luxury adventure?

Trips are meticulously crafted for a new breed of travellers. Often highly successful people and leaders in their fields, they demand more from their breaks, are keen to explore, and want experiences that remain with them for the rest of their lives. No detail is overlooked in the crafting of trips that combine adventure with luxury for its global client base.

CEO Adam Sebba comments: “We’ve learnt over the years that when highly successful people travel, they like to surround themselves with experts and enjoy immersive experiences. Whether it is wildlife guides, anthropologists or historians, or pairing our clients with marine biologists to dive and study sharks, they demand access to insight as they would in their jobs and home life. It is precisely this network of experts built up over ten years that gives us our competitive advantage.”

Over the years Cookson Adventures has created new market demand, reinventing what it is to explore by combining discovery with elegance.

Experiences such as a polar bear safari, pairing a 50m superyacht with a 300tonne icebreaker, push the boundaries of travel. For this recent expedition, the company was tasked with finding somewhere unusual to venture to, with the challenge of incorporating the client’s own superyacht into the adventure. The team factored in the client’s passion for nature and wildlife and curated a remarkable yachting expedition to Svalbard, deep within the Arctic circle.

Polar bears are the iconic animal of Svalbard and are protected in the region, due to their dwindling population of only 3,000 across this Norwegian archipelago and the neighbouring Franz Josef Land, of Russia. After extensive research and close work with a team of experts, Cookson Adventures took the client further north than most superyachts would dare to travel, using the support of the commercial icebreaker to open up a channel through the frozen sea.

Once well inside the sea-ice, the team launched snowmobiles overboard and worked with renowned polar bear trackers to get safely as close as 50 metres away from the bears without disrupting them. As the bears feasted on a fresh kill, the team gained a true insight into one of the world’s most vulnerable and yet powerful species.

Meanwhile, lunch was prepared, with a table set on the ice, chairs draped with sheepskin rugs, and with the backdrop of an endless white horizon. Fine wine and flowing conversation accompanied the meal.

The client was also granted exclusive access to the area’s scientific outposts, learning about the day-to-day lives of the scientists whose mission it is to protect Svalbard’s ecosystem.

“The Svalbard expedition is the perfect example of a Cookson Adventures experience. Not only did we combine adventure and luxury, we worked with our extensive network of world experts to get close to one of the world’s most elusive creatures and provided an encounter incomparable to anything the client had experienced before,” commented Sebba.

“The challenge for a CEO of this business is to achieve growth and scale whilst remaining true to our vision of being completely bespoke and not reverting to a made-to-measure offering. But it’s not hard to be passionate about a job when you are involved in such exciting ventures.”

Founder Henry Cookson, remains closely involved in the business. “In the coming year, we intend to continue being as innovative as we can,” he says. “We are planning to take clients in a submersible to visit Titanic, visit an extraordinary coming-of-age ceremony in Papua New Guinea, and organise a dive to salvage 100 year old vintage wine.

“Continually pushing boundaries, attention to detail, and delivering the highest quality is the only way that we can continue to grow and remain the market leader,” Cookson concludes.