Villa Vie: Odyssey passengers complain of horrendous smell after toilets stopped flushing at start of cruise

A passenger on the “cursed” Odyssey cruise ship has given the vessel a damning new nickname after a series of problems, including not being able to flush the toilets and have a hot shower, plagued the ship for the first few days of its voyage.

Villa Vie Residences’ Odyssey cruise ship promised passengers a luxury around-the-world voyage, stopping at 425 ports in 147 countries across three and a half years.

After a series of delays, repairs and sea trials, the cruise departed at the end of September – four months later than their initial start time, leaving over a hundred passengers stranded in Belfast in the summer.

Now that the ship has set sail, the luxury all-inclusive cruise was not all that some passengers had hoped for after months of waiting to start their new lives in their residential cabins.

One passenger, Joe Rhodes, had nicknamed the ship “SS Clusterf***” after a claiming that a string of onboard problems started to arise once they began their journey.

Writing on his Substack on 14 October, Rhodes said that “every single thing, from the food to the furnishings, the TV channels to the swimming pools (neither of which are yet operational), have turned out to be something less than advertised.”

On the first night, he said that the hot water stopped working before the water was shut off entirely once they arrived in Brest, France, their first stop on the itinerary.

“Nothing from the taps, nothing from the showers and — most importantly — no way to flush the toilets. Most residents didn’t realise this — the shutdown happening in the middle of the night — until AFTER they’d made deposits, so to speak.

“Yep, we awakened to the faint smell of s*** marinating in a hundred unflushed bowls, wafting through the corridors, gently mixing with the ocean breeze,” he wrote.

Rhodes did say that it was only a matter of hours before the toilets were able to flush and the cold water running in the afternoon the following day, but the hot water did not return until their second day in Bilbao, Spain.

The passenger claimed that Villa Vie told them the water issues were due to the previous ship owners not installing the water tanks properly, meaning the waste tank filled up too quickly.

Since writing the blog post, and now the water issues have been fixed, Rhodes told The Telegraph that…