Gung-ho culture at Warmbier's tour agency on N. Korea trip

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.

[...] the death last week of 22-year-old American student Otto Warmbier, who was arrested during a Young Pioneer tour to North Korea in late 2015 and fell into a coma in prison, has renewed questions about whether the company was adequately prepared for its trips into the hard-line communist state.

[...] in travel circles in Beijing, the staging point for trips into North Korea, Young Pioneer Tours, also known as YPT, 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 where two generations of the Kim family are buried, resulting in a North Korean guide losing her job.

In an emotional news conference last week, Fred Warmbier, Otto's father, lashed out at tour agencies that "advertise slick ads on the internet proclaiming, 'No American ever gets detained on our tours' and 'This is a safe place to go.'"

"Hipster adventure tourism, where it's like going to a zoo and staring at North Koreans, is problematic," said Delury, who is familiar with several of the companies running tours into North Korea.

YPT has in recent years expanded its North Korea tours and boasts a long list of other so-called "dark tourism" offerings, ranging from trips to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site in Ukraine to jaunts through Iraq's largely autonomous Kurdish region.