A Cruise Ship Was Their Home. Now Villa Vie Residents Must Leave

(Bloomberg) -- For the past two years, Lanette Canen and Johan Bodin have used social media to chronicle their lives on the Villa Vie Odyssey, a cruise ship that was on an around-the-world trip until it ran out of fuel in Cambodia.

Now, their dream voyage appears over. The couple are among hundreds of residents shocked by an order to disembark the ship in Sihanoukville, where the vessel has been stranded because it can’t afford fuel, which Villa Vie Residences claims has as much as quadrupled in price since the Iran War began.

“Lanette’s not happy that she’s getting up but we have six hours to pack our belongings — in Cambodia, in Sihanoukville,” Johan said in a YouTube video on Tuesday, when he disclosed the Odyssey was ordering all passengers to disembark by 2 p.m. that day. 

“I don’t want to leave,” said Lanette. 

About 200 residents were aboard the 650-passenger ship when disembarkation was ordered, Villa Vie founder Mikael Petterson said in a telephone interview, noting the company is set to cover lodging and local transportation, but not the cost of travel out of Cambodia.

The company “recognizes that this is a difficult and disruptive period for residents, crew members, and employees,” it said in a statement. 

The Odyssey’s travails are a microcosm of the damage caused to businesses by the US war on Iran, which this week sent Brent crude over $115 a barrel. It also raises questions over Villa Vie’s investment model: the company sells cabins for permanent residency at prices ranging from under $130,000 to $440,000, plus monthly fees of $2,000 to $10,000, according to its brochure.

The Odyssey began its world voyage in October 2024, and its arrival in Cambodia follows port visits in Thailand. The company was next scheduled to go to Vietnam, though its website outlined ambitious long-term plans for travel to destinations as far flung as Casablanca and the Caribbean, along with Greenland, Madagascar and Melbourne.

But as fuel prices have climbed, so has talk of a looming crisis.

In the two months before the order, Lanette and Johan say residents were repeatedly told the company was short of money, then given hope that investors or other solutions were on the way. When those plans fell through, the cycle began again. Lanette describes the experience as “emotionally exhausting,” and the couple says residents were divided over how to save the ship.

Petterson said residents had balked at a request to contribute toward fuel for the ship’s departure. Villa Vie proposed an extra $500 a month, plus a fuel surcharge, and was seeking financing.

The company said fuel costs had risen from a historical average of about $1,800 per cabin a month to as much as $8,000 in parts of Asia. Fuel pushed monthly costs to $3 million, and Villa Vie is considering a financial restructuring and seeking new funding over the next 60 days.

But for now, many of the Odyssey’s investor-passengers remain in Sihanoukville, a one-time boomtown that during the pandemic saw criminal syndicates seize empty resorts, casinos and condos for use as industrial-scale cyber-scam compounds. 

A subsequent nationwide crackdown shut hundreds of illicit operations, driving out victims and syndicate bosses by the thousands, but Sihanoukville remains a ghost of its former self. A recent visit revealed padlocked casinos and abandoned scam compounds lining the coast, flanked by rows of shuttered Chinese restaurants and half-built concrete towers.

“It’s a blessing for Sihanoukville,” said Ayub Yulianto, general manager of the Novotel Sihanoukville Holiday Resort. “The province has suffered from this rather negative perception, so having the cruise people in Sihanoukville hopefully creates a positive impact.”

The Odyssey, itself, never operated at full capacity, according to resident Randy Cassingham, who documented his time aboard the vessel on his Residential Cruising blog where he posted the disembarkation notice.

“I think we probably peaked at around 350, and there were around 200 still active at the end,” Cassingham said in an Oct. 27 update in which he criticized Villa Vie for doing little to help the stranded passengers.

“The cabins were small and sparse, but that was OK: cabins were really our bedrooms and a place to shower,” he said. “But it wasn’t ‘luxury’ — it was promoted, after all, as ‘affordable’ and it was until the company started begging for money.”

For some people who had looked into buying a cabin, news of the Odyssey’s stranding confirmed their decision to wait. One Reddit user said an aunt had planned to sell her home to buy one, but put the plan on hold after family members raised concerns.

Several users also questioned whether the ship’s business model could work without a steady stream of new cabin buyers and payments from current residents.

The ship originally left Belfast, Northern Ireland, for a “continuous” voyage around the world, according to the company’s website. Johan said he and Lanette had hoped to live aboard for 15 years or more, and that they valued their two years at sea but worried about people who had joined recently or invested their savings and retirement income.

Holly Hennessy has been traveling the world aboard the Odyssey with her cat, Captain, narrating their journey on a Facebook page called Captain the Cruising Kitty. Her posts capture their unexpected life ashore, with Captain on a bed at Sihanoukville’s Independence Hotel, where Jacqueline Kennedy once stayed, and riding through the city in a tuk-tuk.

“We’ve had a few months to anticipate this happening; most shipmates have gotten to a place of acceptance,” Hennessy said. “It’s still utterly heartbreaking though.”

--With assistance from K. Oanh Ha, Philip J. Heijmans, Erich Parpart, Satid Sutipanya and Shadab Nazmi.