Fuel costs end the Odyssey's 'never-ending' cruise, stranding residents in Cambodia

The Odyssey set sail from Belfast, Northern Ireland, in October 2024 with an explicit pitch: with Donald Trump re-elected to the White House, it offered those ill-disposed to the president a way to spend four years at sea and “skip forward” past his term. A couple could buy in for $319,998, with monthly fees on top covering food, drinks, wifi, wellness programmes and room cleaning, on a ship with a pool, a pickleball court, a theatre, several bars and a gym.

Villa Vie said it had slowed the itinerary and spent more time in port to cut fuel use, but those measures “have not been enough to offset the extraordinary increase in fuel costs, and we have been unable to continue carrying the resulting operating losses”. The company said it was “working with residents to coordinate disembarkation and temporary living arrangements” and was evaluating “restructuring and recapitalisation alternatives over the next 60 days”.

Passengers described shock and grief. "People were shell-shocked, numb, crying," said Kit Cassingham, who spent two years on the ship with her husband, Randy. "People were angry. They were hysterical. They were sad … Disbelief." Rina Cavazza, a pilates instructor from Brisbane, said: "We knew the worst-case scenarios, but we didn't think it would come to reality, which it did."

The end came abruptly. Crew had asked each passenger to contribute $1,800 so the ship could reach Bangkok; the next day, a loudspeaker announcement said the operator had "unfortunately" been "unable to secure the fuel necessary to continue operations", and an email told everyone to disembark by 2pm. Sherrie Cornett wrote on Facebook that passengers were "dropped unceremoniously in the middle of town, left to our own devices". The company provided no financial aid, passengers said, or even a list of hotels; it later offered tickets on a charter flight to the US, after many had already left.

Passengers said warning signs of financial distress had been apparent for weeks. While docked in Singapore in August, residents were told the company did not have enough money to continue cruising, and several contributed their own funds. Food quality deteriorated and shore excursions became rarer, passengers said. “I realised as soon as the strait of Hormuz incident came along, the energy of the ship changed,” Kit said. Randy noted the ship “drinks petrol by the metric tonne”, buying 150 metric tonnes of fuel at a time, with a full tank costing about $800,000. Most of the more than 200 passengers were Americans, many of them retired or digital nomads. Randy said residents had also passed a jar around to collect money for the crew of 156, who remain stuck in Cambodia, and that very few expected to get any money back.

Mikael Petterson, who launched Villa Vie Residences in 2023, accepted that he was the "villain in the story" but said he was doing everything he could to help. "Nobody that's tried residential cruising has succeeded and we have gone further than anyone else," he said. "But I think we would have been absolutely fine and we would have seen this through, if there was no Iran war."

Industry analyst Prof Andrew Coggins said the Odyssey’s story was unlikely to put people off cruises, pointing to a boom that took global passenger numbers to a record 37.2 million in 2025, but noted that residential ships were a very small category with notoriously difficult finances. “The World is the only other one I know about,” he said, adding that it was purpose-built with much bigger cabins. A three-year voyage offered by Miray Cruises in 2023 was cancelled weeks before departure after the sums failed to add up.