Villa Vie Odyssey continuous cruise collapse, Digi Mart USA News: Alberta entrepreneur Gian Perroni was living in Costa Rica when he saw a television report about what was described as the first-ever continuous cruise, an opportunity to live permanently at sea and travel the world.
The inaugural voyage was scheduled to last 1,301 days, or three and a half years, with the assumption that passengers could buy their way onto another ship at the end of that period and continue travelling if they chose to do so.
“I had so much FOMO thinking this thing was going to sell out in five minutes,” said Mr. Perroni, who had never previously gone on a cruise.
“I sold my house, gave away my surfboards and bikes and showed up in Belfast with two duffel bags and a backpack. I thought this was the most amazing adventure.”
The adventure came to an abrupt halt on Oct. 28 at the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville. About 750 days after the ship set sail in 2024, Florida-based operator Villa Vie Residences announced it could no longer operate the Odyssey, in part because of the rising price of fuel, a result of the Iran war.
Last Wednesday, the ship set sail for Singapore without any of its roughly 200 passengers, many of whom had sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars into the project. The Odyssey is expected to be auctioned off to pay the company’s debts, as Villa Vie faces potential bankruptcy.
In a statement, the company said it “continues to evaluate potential paths forward, but no financing or transaction has been finalized.” In an interview with Business Insider, Mikael Petterson, who founded Villa Vie alongside his wife, Kathy Villalba, insisted that “we would have been absolutely fine, and we would have seen this through, if there was no Iran war.”
While astronomical fuel costs have hit the cruise industry worldwide, Villa Vie customers who spoke with The Globe and Mail and other media pointed to poor decisions by the company that they said put the business in a vulnerable position long before the closing of the Strait of Hormuz and the subsequent spike in oil prices.
“It was managed really badly,” said Mary Ann Demsar, from Stony Creek, Ontario. “Money was just not spent properly.
It looks like they were really hemorrhaging money from three months in.”
While some passengers, like Ms. Demsar, rented their cabins, many were part-owners and investors in the project, and it was to them that Villa Vie turned when money became tight.
“It seemed to be a regular occurrence. There was always something that was coming up,” Mr.
Perroni said. “The cash calls became more frequent and became more outrageous.”
Villa Vie offered generous interest terms to passengers who would provide funds to keep the project going, he added, but it became increasingly unclear whether the interest would ever be paid.
Ms. Demsar said many ordinary customers remained in the dark about how often Villa Vie was turning to “founders” for help, but the severity of the situation became clear “when they started to ask for money from the rest of the residents.”
She was among the nearly 200 passengers who disembarked in Sihanoukville last month; some, like Mr. Perroni, had left the ship earlier.
“On Tuesday, when I woke up, we saw a message from Kathy, the owner, posted in the middle of the night: Everybody out by 2 p.m.,” Ms. Demsar said.
“For a lot of people, this was their home. They had sold their homes, and everything they had was in these cabins.
It was frantic and overwhelming for a lot of people.”
She credited the ship’s crew with helping passengers, many of whom were elderly retirees with limited mobility, pack and disembark, and the government of Cambodia, which stepped in to support the stranded passengers with accommodations and food.
Ms. Demsar is now exploring the country, one of dozens she visited aboard the Odyssey, and said she plans to keep travelling with several friends she made on board.
“This has been a great two years,” she said. “And this is not stopping many of us.
I want to go around the world, follow the itinerary the Odyssey would have followed.”
Mr. Perroni was equally upbeat despite losing several hundred thousand dollars.
If he felt aggrieved, he said, it was on behalf of customers who had signed up in the past few months. “They were taking money from people they knew they couldn’t service,” he said.
“There was one guy on the ship who spent 26 days on board, and others who never even got on the ship and spent the same kind of money we did.”
Villa Vie did not respond to a request for comment on whether it misled passengers about the financial viability of the company. On its website, it continues to promote packages aboard the Odyssey and its “second residential ship,” the Legacy, which it says will launch in “early 2029.”
Mr. Perroni remains a “huge believer” in the concept of a continuous cruise, particularly for retirees, noting that even the higher-end costs of living on a ship like the Odyssey are lower than those of many long-term care homes.
“It has been an amazing experience for most of us.”
For him, it has also been life-changing: when the ship was stuck for almost half a year in Belfast in 2024 and looked like it might never depart, he met his wife, Angie.
“We were the only two that didn’t complain about the four-month delay,” he said. “Any time something negative has happened, it’s always been followed by something positive.
We found each other and we’re living our best lives. We’re just not on the ship right now.”
