Tour agency used by Warmbier has wild reputation

BEIJING — Beer-soaked “booze cruises” down North Korea’s Taedong River. Scuba diving trips off the country’s eastern coast. Saint Patrick’s Day pub crawls in Pyongyang featuring drinking games with cheery locals.

Since 2008, the Young Pioneer Tours agency built up a business attracting young travelers with a competitively priced catalog of exotic-sounding, hard-partying adventures in one of the world’s most isolated countries.

But the death last week of 22-yearold American student Otto Warmbier, who was arrested during a Young Pioneer tourand fell into a coma in prison, has renewed questions about whether the company was prepared for its trips.

Although many details of Warmbier’s trip remain unknown, interviews with past Young Pioneer customers or those who have crossed paths with the tour operator describe a company with occasional lapses in organization, a gung-ho drinking culture and a cavalier attitude that has long raised red flags among industry peers and North Korea watchers.

Founded in 2008 by Briton Gareth Johnson in the central Chinese city of Xi’an, Young Pioneer’s fun and casual style was seen precisely as its calling card.

But in travel circles in Beijing, the staging point for trips into North Korea, Young Pioneer Tours has been associated with a string of cautionary tales, including of the tourist who performed a handstand outside the most politically sensitive mausoleum in Pyongyang, resulting in a North Korean guide losing her job.

Earlier this week, YPT issued a statement saying it would no longer accept American customers because “the assessment of risk for Americans visiting North Korea has become too high.”