Are there any places in the world where you can actually “travel” with an airship / zeppelin etc? (Not just a tour or joyride)

Question

There has been a small resurgence in the last couple of decades of airships / zeppelins typically using Helium instead of the Hydrogen used in the olden days.

So I'm sure there must be plenty of places where you can do a joyflight or sightseeing loop and come back where you started.

But are there any places in the world where an airship / zeppelin is used for actual travel where you get on at one point and disembark at another?

(Extra points if the trip crosses international borders, large bodies of water, or both!)

Answer 1

Absolutely!

Scheduled flights between two separate destinations are hard to come by, probably due to the fact that specialized facilities need to be available to house these monsters. Charters seem to be your only viable option, really, between destinations at non-trivial distances one from another.

• Zeppelin NT, the successor of the legendary Zeppelin company, offers charter flights, but they are touted as "exclusive experience" and they are likely to cost an arm, a leg and/or a pair of corneas. You can customize your flight route any way you like

• Zeppelin Tours offer some more destinations around the world: Germany, UK, the Netherlands, USA. These guys also offer cruises: they had one in 2010 from Germany to the Netherlands, and in 2008 between Germany and UK. No definitive schedule, but you can register your interest for the future if you like.

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If you are not willing to spend this kind of money, but still want to get the "airship experience", here's some other more reasonable options (for some value of "reasonable"):

• AirShip Ventures offers sightseeing in 12-seat air ships in the San Francisco Bay Area, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, San Diego, and on occasions Montery, Camaillo and Sacramento. Pricing starts from $375.

• Zeppelin NT also offers flights from 30 min to 2 hours in their eponymous airships around the Bodensee lake in Germany, with stops around the lake for city sightseeing. Unfortunatelly, their website is only in German. There is a list of available tours, along with pricing (these things tend to be expensive, it seems).

• Goodyear Blimps are very recognizable, and you have probably seen them around the world. It seems that they are actually available for passenger flights as well, but unfortunatelly, only by invitation.

Answer 2

As @mindcorrosive has found, there are a few companies doing tourist jaunts. Indeed recently there were two operating in Switzerland (until 2006) and one over London in 2008!

However, the closest I can find to being actually fly from A to B is if you CHARTER one, but it's not cheap - for a two hour charter it'll cost you about US$10,000....

Answer 3

But are there any places in the world where an airship / zeppelin is used for actual travel where you get on at one point and disembark at another?

If by 'actual travel', you mean to imply regular, economical travel, the answer is, sadly, no.