The best-selling car in the UK in 1993 was the Ford Escort. Had you bought one in that year, by now it would probably need quite a lot of attention on things like the gearbox and steering. Likewise, a cruise ship launched 31 years ago is also likely to have one or two mechanical issues.
That is the best spin I can put on the fact that the good ship Odyssey is not, as planned, cruising the west coast of France this weekend on her way from Le Havre to Bordeaux. Instead, she remains tied up in Belfast – as she has been all summer long – while engineers work on her rudders and gearbox.
Odyssey has been reconfigured as a floating apartment block on which well-to-do people can glide around the world. She is following in the wake of The World, which calls itself “the planet’s largest private residential yacht”.
For years, The World has taken her extremely well-heeled passengers around the globe and back again. One long-time resident of that vessel, Peter Antonucci, revealed to the BBC’s World At One this week that a cabin starts at £2.3m with a £300,000 annual fee on top.
The owner of Odyssey, Villa Vie Residences of Florida, has gone for economies of scale: buying a ship with room for 1,000 and reducing the cost of ownership of an inside cabin to a “mere” £100,000 plus an annual service charge starting at £16,000 per person. In return, you get taken on a 42-month circumnavigation.
August 2025 should see you in Japan; the same month a year later it’s Vietnam; and back to Europe for the following summer in Greece, land of Odysseus.
You may recall an organisation called Life At Sea that tried something similar: a subscription model in which a couple paid £60,000 annually for the most basic cabin. But every subscriber ended up disappointed and did not even step aboard after the tricky business of obtaining a ship proved too much.
The residents (not passengers, please) of Odyssey can at least enjoy their quarters and conform with the “recommended onboard attire” of “country club casual”. But the scenery is not shifting as much as they might have hoped. All summer, the ship’s sole location has been the BT3 postcode in east Belfast.
Villa Vie Residences promises “a global community that doesn’t just visit places but deeply connects with them”.
This summer the residents had hoped…
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