They signed up for a ‘forever’ cruise. Their dream ran aground after 750 days | Canada Voices

Alberta entrepreneur Gian Perroni was living in Costa Rica when he saw a TV report on what was described as the first-ever continuous cruise, a chance to live permanently at sea and travel the world.

The inaugural voyage was scheduled to last 1,301 days, or three and a half years, with the assumption that passengers could buy their way onto another ship at the end of that period and continue travelling, if they chose to do so.

“I had so much FOMO thinking this thing was going to sell out in five minutes,” said Mr. Perroni, who had previously never gone on a cruise in his life. “I sold my house, gave away my surfboards and bikes and showed up in Belfast with two duffel bags and a backpack. I thought this was the most amazing adventure.”

The adventure came to an abrupt halt on Oct. 28, at the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville. About 750 days after the ship set sail in 2024, Florida-based operator Villa Vie Residences announced it could no longer operate the Odyssey, in part because of the rising price of fuel, a result of the Iran war.

Last Wednesday, the ship set sail for Singapore, without any of its 200 or so passengers, many of whom had sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars into the project. The Odyssey is expected to be auctioned off to pay the company’s debts, as Villa Vie faces potential bankruptcy.

In a statement, the company said it “continues to evaluate potential paths forward, but no financing or transaction has been finalized.” In an interview with Business Insider, Mikael Petterson, who founded Villa Vie alongside his wife, Kathy Villalba, insisted that “we would have been absolutely fine − and we would have seen this through − if there was no Iran war.”

While astronomical fuel costs have hit the cruise industry worldwide, Villa Vie customers who spoke with The Globe and Mail and other media pointed to poor decisions by the company that they said put the business in a vulnerable position long before the closing of the Strait of Hormuz and subsequent spike in the price of oil.

“It was managed really badly,” said Mary Ann Demsar, from Stony Creek, Ont. “Money was just not spent properly. It looks like they were really hemorrhaging money from three months in.”

While some passengers on the Odyssey, like Ms. Demsar, rented their cabins, many were part-owners and investors in the project, and it was to them that Villa Vie turned when money became tight.

“It seemed to be a regular occurrence − there was always something that was coming up,” Mr. Perroni said. “The cash calls became more frequent and became more outrageous.”

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Villa Vie offered generous interest terms to passengers who would stump up funds to keep the project going, he added, but it became increasingly unclear whether the interest would ever be paid.

Ms. Demsar said many ordinary customers remained in the dark about how often Villa Vie was turning to “founders” for help, but the direness of the situation became clear “when they started to ask for money from the rest of the residents.”

She was among the nearly 200 passengers who disembarked in Sihanoukville last month (some, like Mr. Perroni, left the ship earlier).

“On Tuesday, when I woke up, we saw a message from Kathy, the owner, posted in the middle of the night: Everybody out by 2 p.m.,” Ms. Demsar said. “For a lot of people, this was their home. They had sold their homes, everything they had was in these cabins. It was frantic and overwhelming for a lot of people.”

She credited the ship’s crew for helping passengers − many of whom were elderly retirees with limited mobility − handle packing and disembarking, and the government of Cambodia, which stepped in to support the stranded passengers, assisting with accommodations and food.

Ms. Demsar is currently exploring the country, one of dozens she visited aboard the Odyssey, and said she plans to continue travelling alongside several friends she made on board. “This has been a great two years,” she said. “And this is not stopping many of us. I want to go around the world, follow the itinerary the Odyssey would have followed.”

Mr. Perroni was equally upbeat, despite being out several hundred thousand dollars.

If he felt aggrieved, he said, it was for those customers who had signed up in the past few months. “They were taking money from people they knew they couldn’t service,” he said. “There was one guy on the ship who spent 26 days on board, others who never even got on the ship and spent the same kind of money we did.”

Villa Vie did not respond to a request for comment about whether it misled passengers about the financial viability of the company. On its website, it continues to promote packages on board the Odyssey and its “second residential ship,” the Legacy, which it says will be launched in “early 2029.”

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Mr. Perroni remains a “huge believer” in the concept of a continuous cruise, particularly for retirees, as even the higher-end costs of living on a ship like the Odyssey are lower than those of many long-term care homes. “It has been an amazing experience for most of us.”

For him, it has also been a life-changing one: When the ship was stuck for almost half a year in Belfast in 2024 and looked like it might never depart, he met his wife, Angie.

“We were the only two that didn’t complain about the four-month delay,” he said. “Any time something negative has happened, it’s always been followed by something positive. We found each other and we’re living our best lives. We’re just not on the ship right now.”