‘Skip forward’ voyage marketed as Trump escape ends after two years
Passengers aboard the MV Odyssey learned the voyage was over in an announcement that gave them seven hours to get off. On Tuesday, Villa Vie Residences, the Florida-based operator of the residential cruise ship, said it had run out of money amid a surge in oil prices and that the four-year voyage would go no further than Cambodia. Residents packed their belongings and were transported by bus into the Cambodian port city of Sihanoukville, on the Gulf of Thailand.
The Odyssey had set sail from Belfast, Northern Ireland, in October 2024 with an explicit pitch: Donald Trump had been re-elected, and for $319,998 a couple could spend the length of his presidential term at sea on a four-year “skip forward”. A permanent residency option cost a few hundred thousand dollars more, with monthly fees on top covering food, drinks, wifi, wellness programmes and room cleaning. Passengers had access to a pool, a pickleball court, a theatre, several bars and a gym, with exotic ports on the itinerary.
The company tied the collapse to fuel rather than demand. In its Tuesday statement, Villa Vie said monthly fuel costs per cabin in parts of Asia had risen to as much as $8,000 from $1,800, placing it “under unsustainable financial pressure”. “Since the conflict began in late February, we have taken significant steps to reduce fuel consumption, including slowing the itinerary and spending more time in port,” the company said. “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.”
Villa Vie said it was “working with residents to coordinate disembarkation and temporary living arrangements” and was supporting residents, crew and employees “as we evaluate restructuring and recapitalisation alternatives over the next 60 days”. Passengers said the company provided no financial aid, or even a list of hotels in Cambodia, and it later offered tickets for a charter flight to the United States, although many passengers had already left. The Guardian reported it had contacted the company for comment.
According to the Guardian’s account, the ship had a previous life. Before Villa Vie restructured it, the 642-foot (196-metre) vessel was the MS Braemar, a traditional cruise liner turned away from several Caribbean ports during the pandemic after its passengers became ill; Cuba eventually allowed it to dock, at Mariel in March 2020, and it never went into service under that name again. Fred Olsen cruises sold off the three-decade-old ship, which Villa Vie described as “an intimate residential cruise ship offering a new way to live”.
Residential ships are a small category of their own. MS The World, the pioneer of the segment, offers apartments that typically range from $2 million to $15 million, carries a waiting list, and lets its passengers choose where the ship travels. The Odyssey was billed as the “affordable” option for buyers outside that league.
More than 200 passengers were aboard, most of them Americans and many retired or working as digital nomads, supported by an international crew of 156 that included a ship’s doctor and two nurses. Holly Hennessy had lived on the ship with her Siamese cat, Captain, since it set sail two years ago. Lanette Canen and Johan Bodin, who said they had bought a cabin with a 15-year guarantee, documented their life at sea on YouTube. Kit and Randy Cassingham spent two years aboard, turning their cabin into a home with their own rugs and pictures on the walls.
In the ship’s lounge on the final night, footage showed residents drinking as rumours spread that the voyage might be over. Staff had asked each passenger to contribute $1,800 to ensure the ship had funds to travel to Bangkok. The next day, a voice on the loudspeaker said the operator had “unfortunately” been “unable to secure the fuel necessary to continue operations”, and an email asked everyone to disembark by 2pm.
“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. I mean, that whole gamut of, what is it, the five stages of grief.” Bodin, who called himself “Mr Super Positive” in a video, said he had “felt really drained the last two months”. Rina Cavazza, a pilates instructor from Brisbane, Australia, said: “We knew the worst-case scenarios, but we didn’t think it would come to reality, which it did.” Another passenger, Sherrie Cornett, wrote on Facebook that residents were “dropped unceremoniously in the middle of town, left to our own devices”.
The Cassinghams said life aboard changed once the Iran war began. The food quality deteriorated and there was less of it, they said, and shore excursions grew fewer. “I realised as soon as the strait of Hormuz incident came along, the energy of the ship changed,” Kit said. “I think it was because the ship management realised how much more this was going to cost. And then they were starting to do cutbacks that we weren’t aware of yet.” She added: “I watched the world, and I don’t even pay attention to the news, but I’ve watched it just kind of crumble and shatter.” While docked in Singapore in August, passengers had already been told the company did not have enough money to continue cruising, and several residents contributed their own funds to get the ship moving again.
Randy said the underlying economics had long been visible. The ship, he said, “drinks petrol by the metric tonne”. “You know, literally they’re buying 150 metric tonnes of fuel at a time,” he said. “We’re talking about $800,000 if we tried to get a full tank.” He said residents hold little hope of recovering their money: “Very few expect to get any money back because we know that they [the company] have been in terrible money problems from the beginning.” Passengers have also passed a jar around to collect money for the crew, who are stuck in Cambodia with them.
Mikael Petterson, who launched Villa Vie Residences in 2023, said earlier in the week that he accepted he was the “villain in the story” but that he was doing everything he could to help the stranded passengers. “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.”
Prof Andrew Coggins, an industry analyst, said the wider cruise industry is unlikely to be deterred. Global passengers reached a historical high of 37.2 million in 2025, an unprecedented boom since the end of the Covid pandemic that he attributed in part to “pent up demand” from those unable to cruise during the pandemic years, and in part to the format’s value. “You get to be pampered, you pack and unpack once, but you see different places, you eat better food than you would get at home, and then you have the romance of going to sea,” he said. Residential ships are another matter. “The World is the only other one I know about and I think there are a couple that are trying to start up,” Coggins said. The niche has a recent precedent: in 2023, Miray Cruises cancelled a planned three-year cruise, with fares starting at $30,000 per person per year and covering accommodation, food, drinks, laundry and health care, weeks before its scheduled departure because it could not make the sums add up. “The World was actually built as a residential ship,” Coggins said. “The cabins or the state rooms are much bigger.”
Now in a hotel in Cambodia and working out what comes next, Randy has been blogging to keep people updated. “Our message is that we’re not saying ‘poor me’. We know that people are having trouble, that they’re trying to put fuel in their cars, food in their mouths. And we’re very lucky. We’re not crying in our soup. So we are completely aware that we’re very lucky and that we’re going to land on our feet and be OK,” he said. Kit, a transformation coach, agreed. “This isn’t a pity party for us,” she said. “We actually want to say to people: ‘Live your dreams. Go for the gusto. Live life while you can because you don’t know how the adventure will turn out’.”