Jason Whitelhas

Picture selling your house to live on a cruise ship for the next 15 years. Two years in, the ship docks in Cambodia and the company tells everyone to get off. That just happened to about 200 people. And at today's fuel prices, the $120,000 they paid for a cabin covers as little as 15 months of fuel. The ship is the Villa Vie Odyssey. It was built in 1993, sat in storage through Covid, and a Florida startup bought it for about $13 million. Their pitch was simple. You buy your cabin up front, starting around $120,000, you pay a monthly fee starting at $1,750 a person, and the ship sails around the world nonstop for 15 years. The trouble started way before anything went wrong. The company says fuel was running about $1,800 per cabin per month before this year. So someone living alone in a cheap cabin was paying less each month than it cost just to fuel the average cabin, and that's before you feed anybody, pay 156 crew, or fix anything on a 33-year-old ship. Then the Iran war kicked off in February and fuel went through the roof. In parts of Asia the company says it's now $6,000 to $8,000 per cabin per month. And it gets worse, because a ship burns about the same fuel whether it's packed or half empty. The Odyssey can hold 650 passengers. It pulled into Cambodia with 203 on board, so the fuel for all those empty cabins was getting covered by the people who actually showed up. If you were on the ship, you could probably feel it coming. One resident told the AP they'd been hit up for fuel money every two to four weeks. When a company that sold you a fixed price starts passing the hat that often, it's usually running out of road. Now the company says it'll spend 60 days working on a "restructuring and recapitalization." If you paid six figures up front for years of service that just stopped, that phrase should worry you, because people who prepaid usually end up near the back of the line behind the lenders. Most of these folks were promised 15 years on that ship, and they got a little over two.