Titanic II Luxury Cruise to Feature Festive Confetti Delousing

When last we checked in with Australian billionaire MP Clive Palmer and his plans to build a perfect replica of the Titanic (but with more lifeboats), applications for staff were flooding in. Now, he wants to sell you on the pleasures of roughing it in steerage.

News.com.au reports that far from simply reproducing the elaborate Edwardian suites of the first class, the Titanic II will also feature third-class cabins just like the bare-bones originals (best I’ve seen, ma’am—hardly any rats). Palmer isn’t worried, though, because thinks he can sell these tickets by packaging them as a kind of adventure travel:

The ever optimistic Mr Palmer sees the poverty of the hopeful early 20th-century immigrants to the US at the centre of a marketing plan, with an adventure holiday component which stresses the pain will last only five or six days.

“We might offer to recreate the experience of those hopeful immigrants to America,” he said.

Except, you know, without the dislocation, grinding poverty or freezing to death in the North Atlantic. But the experience WILL include the delousing upon arrival mandated by the original training manuals—though it might be a special delousing. A festive delousing!

“And they will be deloused,” Mr Palmer said.

“We might spray them with a hose full of confetti but they will have to have the experience.”