Originally Posted by
YVR Cockroach
The only human-inhabited spaces are research bases and there are no commercial flights to get there. You're not going to find a hotel or lodge. Some adventurers manage to get there for self-propelled trips from a base to the geographic pole (and back or onward to another base). If you want to get to the pole w/o that effort, you'd have to charter and a/c outfitted with skiis. Refuelling and rescue logistics will be challenging and expensive.
You could overfly in the past (and perhaps present). Qantas has offered such flights at least in the past couple of decades and Air New Zealand used to until TE901.CFIT'd int Mt. Erebus.
A cheap cruise will barely touch Antarctica. A more-expensive one will get you to the peninsula closest to S. America.
Yes, it does appear charter is the only option outside planning my own expeditionary trek - and I will not be attempting the latter. There is at least one outfit (
https://www.polarcruises.com/antarct...-camp-punta-14) that flies you down for an overnight as part of a seven day trip but I was hoping that there were options I hadn't found to book JUST the South Pole overnight, to fit into a longer itinerary I cobble together.
Regardless, I've come to terms with the fact that it's a pipe dream - even if I could find an outfit that offers that overnight for ~$20k pp, the kind of trip I have in mind would be longer than the 16 days max we can take for the next fifteen or so years. In the meantime, we can take one of the <100pax cruises - and who knows what the options will look like by 2035 when we're eligible for retirement.
Thank you for the response, though! I'd forgotten I'd posted this. I'd suddenly discovered how cheap two of my other fantasy destinations were, and figured there might be a small chance that we could hit our whole (current) bucket list before retirement. Fortunately, as we travel more and more, our bucket list increases almost infinitely. We'll have plenty of adventures in the meantime.