Odyssey: ’Forever ship’ with a permanent view of Belfast

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 to connect deeply with the people of the Faroes, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Belgium and France through the summer. In fact, the “unforgettable moments of discovery on an extended journey, connecting people, places, and self” promised by the firm’s chief executive, Mikael Petterson, have been confined to Northern Ireland.

That nation has a formidable repertoire of people, history, landscapes, seascapes and cuisine. But after three unexpected bonus months in Belfast, even I might conclude that planned visits to Reykjavik, Oslo and Copenhagen would have brought some welcome contrast to life on board.

Instead, Odyssey has stayed put for repairs – possibly attributable to her long and turbulent career so far. She began her working life in the early 1990s as Crown Dynasty, and has since been reinvented as Crown Majesty, Norwegian Dynasty and Braemar. In that most recent incarnation, she hit the headlines: early in 2020, passengers aboard the vessel tested positive for Covid and she spent a couple of weeks as an unwelcome island-hopper in the Caribbean, being denied permission for port after port before finally Havana let her dock.

She spent the next four years moored at Rosyth in Fife, waiting for yet another buyer and identity. Finally she was chosen by Villa Vie Residences as its “forever ship”.

Eager travellers who had earned well could invest their capital and anticipate drifting gloriously towards eternity. Instead, they have so far found it impossible to leave Northern Ireland.

Want a car? You could pick up a 30-year-old Ford Escort for a pittance, but it is probably better to buy something newer and more reliable.

Want to cruise around the world? Book a round-the-world cruise – not a space in a floating but seemingly unmoveable Ulster apartment block.

Simon Calder, also known as The Man Who Pays His Way, has been writing about travel for The Independent since 1994. In his weekly opinion column, he explores a key travel issue – and what it means for you.