Villa Vie blames fuel costs; says 60-day effort has no assured outcome
Johan Bodin, a Swedish-born carpenter, lived on the Odyssey with his American girlfriend, Lanette Canen, and posted regular YouTube updates about their two years on board. In those dispatches, the couple, who are in their mid-50s, said they had sold their car-rental company on Maui, Hawaii, and paid $100,000 for a 144-square-foot cabin on the Odyssey. The price of what Villa Vie had advertised as “permanent residency” subsequently increased. A $3,500 monthly maintenance fee covered three meals a day, twice-weekly laundry, Wi-Fi, housekeeping and two alcoholic drinks with lunch and dinner, Bodin and Canen said. “So we’re spending way less than what we did in Maui,” a smiling Canen said in one video, posted in February with the Odyssey’s bar in the background.
Bodin said Villa Vie had guaranteed at least 15 to 20 years’ worth of sailing for the Odyssey’s resident passengers, while others had purchased cabins for shorter durations. Life on the ship was not always smooth: its initial departure from Belfast was delayed by several months because of repairs, and while Villa Vie said in 2024 that the Odyssey was “85% sold,” several passengers said in social-media postings that it never came close to reaching its maximum occupancy of 650 passengers.
The Odyssey, a 642-foot cruise ship owned by Florida-based Villa Vie Residences, first set sail from Belfast, Northern Ireland, in October 2024 and stopped in more than 60 countries. Many of its passengers were American retirees and remote workers. Life aboard included a pool, a pickleball court, a theater, several bars and a gym with yoga and other classes, with a doctor and two nurses among the 150-strong crew.
The Odyssey’s captain said in a German documentary broadcast in August that the Iran conflict had sent the price of shipping fuel soaring, leaving the vessel struggling to pay for, or at times even secure, sufficient fuel. According to the documentary, passengers were asked for a $6,000 one-time payment to keep sailing, and Villa Vie raised the monthly service fee for new passengers to $8,999 for double occupancy, according to the company’s website.
On Monday morning, passengers woke to a message from Villa Vie Chief Executive Kathy Villalba. “Unfortunately, we were unable to secure the fuel necessary to continue operations,” the message read, according to a blog post by Randy Cassingham, a passenger who has written about life on the Odyssey on his blog. “As a result, the Odyssey will enter a temporary layup this afternoon.” The message gave passengers until 2 p.m. to leave the ship in Sihanoukville, a Cambodian port town known for its gambling and online-scam industry.
In a statement Tuesday, Villa Vie said its monthly fuel expenses had risen to between $6,000 and $8,000 per cabin, up from around $1,800. “The company cannot simply pass increases of that scale on to residents, and the resulting shortfall has placed its current operating model under unsustainable financial pressure,” it said, adding that it was working with residents to “identify temporary living arrangements.” The company said it would spend the next 60 days working to resolve its financial problems, but that “no outcome is assured.”
The strain had been building for months. In a video posted on Tuesday, Bodin said the past two months had been frustrating, with uncertainty about the ship’s future causing divisions among the Odyssey’s passengers. On his blog, “Residential Cruising,” Cassingham said the number of passengers had dropped to around 200 from 350 at its peak.
Long Dimanche, the deputy governor of the province around Sihanoukville, said that “being ordered to disembark so abruptly has left many retirees and workers effectively homeless, thousands of kilometers away from their home countries.” He added that some of the 203 passengers had flown home, but others were still in the city.
Cassingham said in a blog post on Wednesday that he and other passengers had received no support from Villa Vie to find or pay for hotels. “A few are shellshocked because they spent the majority of their nest-eggs to be here, and don’t know how or where they’ll live,” he wrote.
Villa Vie and Cassingham did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday. Villalba and Mikael Petterson, Villa Vie’s founder and executive chairman, could not be reached for comment. The U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh referred questions about any support it is providing to American passengers to the State Department, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Cassingham, who had sailed on the Odyssey with his wife, Kit, said that despite the uncertainty and frustration, the couple had no regrets about their life at sea. “We made some great friends and have amazing memories,” he wrote in his Wednesday post, “and saw things we never would have seen otherwise.”