Passengers spend hundreds of thousands on berths for a three-year cruise with Villa Vie Residences. More than three months on, they’re all still waiting to leave.
There’s a certain irony about a residential cruise ship stranded in Belfast. After all, this is the city that gave us the Titanic—a vessel famous not for its majestic journey across the Atlantic, but for the fact that it didn’t quite make it.
And now, more than a century later, history—or at least misfortune—seems to be repeating itself with Villa Vie Residences’ Odyssey.
When Villa Vie Residences first unveiled their grand plan for the Odyssey, a name that brings visions of epic adventures of Homeric proportions, it sounded like the golden ticket for retirees who wanted to see the world without leaving the comfort of their own floating villa.
A fifteen-year cruise with stops in 425 ports across 147 countries, but three months after the grand departure date, the ship remains moored in its home dock, passengers left to roam the streets of Belfast instead of the sun-kissed shores of the Mediterranean.
A ship-shaped hotel for a residential cruise
After paying upwards of $149,000 AUD plus a monthly fee, passengers are now trapped in a ship-shaped hotel in Belfast where they can’t stay overnight onboard —rudder issues, the BBC was told—but are allowed in during the day.
Villa Vie Residences’ marketing manager Sebastian Stokkendal said the company had been “humbled by the scale of what it takes to reactivate a 30-year-old vessel from a four-year layup.”
He said that after work on the rudder shafts, steel work and engine overhauls, the ship is almost ready to depart.
“We expect a very anticipated successful launch next week where we will head to Bremerhaven, Amsterdam, Lisbon, then across the Atlantic for our Caribbean segment,” he said in an email to The Associated Press.
The company is doing its best to keep spirits afloat, putting passengers up in hotels across Europe and sending them on complimentary short trips while they wait for the ship to become seaworthy.
One self-proclaimed “cruise addict” Holly Hennessey (above) told the BBC that she hasn’t been able to leave Belfast as she’s travelling with her cat, Captain. “Villa Vie is a community and a real community has pets,” she said.
Ms Hennessey’s cabin has space for a double bed, small living area with room for the cat and a balcony. “We can spend all day aboard the ship, and they provide shuttle buses to get on and off,” Ms Hennessey said.
“We can have all of our meals and they even have movies and trivia entertainment, almost like cruising except we’re at the dock.”
The Odyssey’s CEO, Mike Petterson, remains upbeat. He’s dubbed this ship “the first ‘affordable’ residential cruise ship”—a claim that rings a bit hollow when your floating paradise is currently less mobile than your average iceberg.
But Petterson insists they’re “getting there,” and that the ship will eventually set sail next week.
So, what does this all mean for the future of residential cruising? The idea of living on a ship, of waking up in a new city every other day, has a certain romanticism that’s hard to shake.
But as the Odyssey has shown, the gap between dream and reality can be vast.
