‘Most demand ever’: Aussies pay up to $7k for wild tourism trend in Tornado Alley
Tourists are spending thousands of dollars to drive straight towards violent weather that others run from, and tour operators have never seen demand like it.
Signing up for a tour that promises bad weather is a baffling concept to most – but more and more tourists are doing exactly that.
Adventure lovers and thrillseekers are heading to the US and paying thousands of dollars to drive straight into areas with the highest tornado risk.
And storm chasing tour operators in Tornado Alley tell news.com.au business has never been better thanks to the new film Twisters, a follow-up to the 1996 original Twister, which premiered last month.
Google search data obtained by news.com.au shows that search interest in Tornado Alley spiked 110 per cent in July compared to the month before. Australia was among the top three countries that were searching for the topic.
Tempest Tours, whose founder Martin Lisius was a technical adviser on the original Twister, told news.com.au it had sold out 2025 tours and opened 2026 bookings almost a year earlier than normal.
“It is the most demand I have ever seen having been with the company for 11 years, and I believe it is the most we have seen in our history,” Kim George, a storm chaser and the tour company’s guest relations manager, said.
While they have many return guests, she said this year the number of new guests had doubled – including new and return tourists from Australia signing up for 2025.
Erik Burns, a Texan who met his Australian wife after she signed up for one of his tours to chase tornadoes six years ago, told news.com.au the release of Twisters had definitely caused a boom in business for him too.
Tornadic Expeditions’ 2025 tour schedule has already sold out and they launched their 2026 schedule more than two months early to keep up with demand.
“Our 2026 tours are nearly 40 per cent booked in just a little over two weeks of being opened. Everything is at record pace. Mind blowing,” Mr Burns said.
He describes storm chasing as “the most fun road trip anyone could do” and says the tours attract people from all over the world.
“I have had kids who just graduated high school to retired NASA engineers,” he said.
Mr Burns argues there is no better way to see “Small Town America” and the North American Great Plains – a broad expanse of flat grasslands crossing five US states and two Canadian provinces – than on a storm chasing tour.
“Our guests get much more than storms on these trips. Sightseeing and travelling through many states allows seeing things and places that normal travellers would not see,” Mr Burns said.
“There is no reason for anyone to be in Thedford, Nebraska [population: 200] unless you’re storm chasing!”
Sydney tourist Dean Nye, who has been on four tours with the no-longer operational Cloud 9 Tours, describes storm chasing as “exhilarating”.
Speaking to news.com.au, he found it hard to put the experience into words.
“Just standing there and feeling the energy of the storm and realising the power of mother nature, and you feel it, you see it, you hear it – it’s very incredible,” he said.
Mr Nye went on his first storm chasing tour through America in 2010 and has been on another three trips since. It would have been five if the pandemic didn’t get in the way.
He estimates having seen about a dozen tornadoes.
Becoming a storm chaser
The obsession with storms runs deep for Mr Burns, who grew up in North Texas.
The US has the most tornadoes of any country in the world, and Texas has the most of any state.
The 38-year-old remembers drawing tornadoes on his school work long before he actually saw one.
When he was old enough to drive, he was determined to lay his eyes on a real-life tornado.
Mr Burns finally saw his first tornado as a young man in Anna-Westminster, Texas. It was an F3, which means a severe tornado resulting in severe damage, such as roofs being torn off well-constructed houses, trees uprooted and heavy cars lifted off the ground and thrown.
The date was May 9, 2006.
“That sparked an addiction for more. At this point, I have seen nearly 360 tornadoes. The addiction has not subsided,” he said.
“I am just glad I was able to turn it into a healthy addiction where it provides for me and my family now.”
Mr Burns was taking people out storm chasing years before he started a tour business in 2015, which is designed to still be an intimate experience with a limit of four guests per tour.
He said despite severe weather being common where he comes from, he is still met with fascination and disbelief when anyone asks what he does for a living.
“There are two reactions. That is awesome or you are crazy. There is no middle,” he said.
His love story with his wife, Emma Burns, could almost be plucked out of a movie itself.
The couple met when the Aussie signed up to the wait list for a Tornadic Expeditions tour and luckily got in when someone cancelled their seat. She had never been storm chasing before.
They spoke on Facebook for few a months and decided to go on a date just before the tour kicked off in May 2018. As they say, the rest was history.
“We saw I think around 10 tornadoes together our first time chasing together,” Mr Burns said.
“She went back home after the tour and told her parents ‘I am gonna marry that man’. Fast forward to September of 2018 and in the middle of the Coral Sea, I asked her to marry me. Now we have been married for almost five years and have five kids.”
The couple don’t get to chase together anymore as much as they would like, but say they treasure the times they do.
Real-life tornado chasers
Many Aussies leaving the cinema after Twisters have been left wondering how far-fetched the suspenseful disaster film actually is.
Erik Burns from Tornadic Expeditions and Kim George from Tempest Tours both had positive things to say about the accuracy of the terminology, some of the storm chaser characters, and the look of the tornadoes and storm structures on screen.
However, they warn there is a lot less action in real life.
Mr Burns estimates storm chasing is about 90 per cent driving 10 per cent action.
“Real chasing is certainly exciting and fun but there is for sure some patience involved,” he warns.
“Some days things are just nuts like the movies where there are just tornadoes everywhere all day but that doesn’t happen very often.”
And answering the question on every movie watchers lips: “Nobody is shooting fireworks into tornadoes and anchoring their truck into the ground with augers. Not yet anyway!”
Ms George added that while storm chasing groups do congregate at small town petrol stations at times, unlike the movie, they do not sell things. So you won’t find any “tornado wranglers” like Tyler Owens (played by Glenn Powell) selling T-shirts or mugs with their face along the way, but you will likely get a team shirt to wear on your tour.
“We would not be driving into a farm field and tearing it up,” Ms George confirmed, referring to another common act in the film.
“We are respectful of other people’s property. We, safely, look at the severe storms and tornadoes and don’t drive into them.”
She said not all tornadoes are as clear as seen in the movie but when they do get a good one at just the right light “it’s much better than you see on the movie screen”.
“CG [computer graphics] just cannot compare to the real thing,” she said.
What it is like being a storm chasing tourist
The cost of storm chasing tours depend on how many days you go for, but 10 day tours can cost up to about $7000, while you can get shorter 5-day tours for less than $4000.
Aussie tourist Dean Nye only recalls being nervous one time across his four tours between 2010 and 2018.
It was on his final chase day in 2013 after chasing storms every day for two weeks, which is “quite unusual”.
“We were caught in a bunch of massive storms moving through Oklahoma and they had told Oklahoma City to, not really evacuate, but were like ‘get out of the city if you can, head out of the city, head south’ and we were caught in all that traffic, then these storms shifted,” he said.
“Things got quite sort of dicey because you’re on these highways that are quite clogged, and there were a lot of dangerous storms moving through. I think there were quite a few accidents on the roads.”
There were two tours in 2011 and 2018 where he saw no tornadoes, but he is confident it was still money well spent.
“Weather is so unpredictable, and it’s a gamble you have to take … but it’s still cool because you see amazing storms, great structures and photogenic lightning shows, and get caught in a few big hail storms,” he said.
He described witnessing a tornado as “the icing on the cake”.
Mr Nye said one of the best parts about storm chasing is seeing beautiful parts of America and tiny towns he never would have visited otherwise.
On one tour, he travelled from North Dakota, up near Canada, to Texas, and down near Mexico.
One thing he says is incredibly important about entering these communities during a tour is to be respectful and not show insensitive excitement.
“At the end of the day, the thing we’re trying to find and chase and photograph and experience is what people over there are preparing to take shelter from,” he said.
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