Kit Cassingham credits her yoga practice and her experience as a life coach with keeping her sane these days.
And Cassingham has a lot of reasons to feel crazy: Earlier this week, she and her husband Randy were told to permanently disembark from the Villa Vie Residences Odyssey cruise ship they’d been living on for the last two years.
The Cassinghams, along with around 200 or so fellow passengers, were told that the Villa Vie Odyssey had run out money and could no longer afford fuel, so passengers would need to collect their belongings and find another place to live.
Their odyssey with the Odyssey started more than two years ago, when Cassingham and her husband decided to sell the dream home they had built in Colorado.
“Randy realized he was allergic to Colorado,” Cassingham told Realtor.com. “He was allergic to four-legged animals, mold, dust, grasses, weeds, pinyon and juniper trees. And we lived in a pinyon-juniper forest. His allergies got worse and worse, and even his allergists couldn’t stay on top of it.”
So, the couple decided a never-ending cruise was the one place where Randy might be safe from the scourge of grass and tree allergies.
The Cassinghams initially put a deposit down with Victoria Cruises before realizing that the company didn’t actually own a ship (and still doesn’t, though it continues to sell cabins).
By then, they had already sold their home and taken off on a pre-cruise road trip to say farewell to friends. So they then began looking for other options.
Enter Villa Vie Residence’s Odyssey, where passengers were promised the opportunity to cruise for the rest of their lives, if they wanted.
The Cassinghams purchased a cabin with a balcony on the Odyssey’s 7th floor deck, for $369,000. Monthly charges, which covered housekeeping, laundry, fuel, and three meals a day, were $8,000, though the couple purchased stock in the company, which gave them “founder” status and knocked their monthly fees down to $6,000.
From the start, things were a bit rocky. The Odyssey was supposed to leave in May 2024, but mechanical problems kept the ship docked in Belfast until October 2024.
That’s when she says she began noticing that the Villa Vie’s owners were in over their heads.
“We were we’re gonna go up to Amazon, and it turns out our boat was too big,” she says. “And they just weren’t paying attention to some details.”
Cassingham believes delays leaving Belfast put the company on the backfoot.
“Because we were in Belfast so long, they spent a lot more money on the problems. Every time they would fix one thing, two other problems would come up. So they went into deep debt in Belfast.”
And then when the Iran War broke out in February and the Strait of Hormuz closed, “our fuel bills doubled and then tripled. Yeah. And so if you already are spending more than you’re making, having it double and triple was insane. They did ask several times for us to pay fuel charges.”
Through it all, Cassingham says, “the mood on the ship stayed strong because we were all doing what we loved and wanted to do.”
The ship got to the Philippines days after a deadly typhoon hit the country, and the passengers held a fundraiser and contributed to care packages for victims.
“We’re doing this kind of community stuff, and have no problem raising money for that. We just got tired of raising money for stuff we thought we were already paying for.”
Things took a turn, though, when the ship hit Thailand, and Petterson told passengers that he wouldn’t leave the country until he had secured an investor.
“Next thing we know, he’s pulling up the stakes, and off we go to Cambodia where there’s no Starlink, the cell service is bad, and the fuel is expensive.”
According to Villa Vie’s estimates, per-cabin fuel expenses rose from $1,800 to between $6,000 and $8,000 per month, putting “its current operating model under unsustainable financial pressure.”
“Since the conflict [in Iran] began in late February, we have taken significant steps to reduce fuel consumption, including slowing the itinerary and spending more time in port,” the company’s statement continued. “Those measures have not been enough to offset the extraordinary increase in fuel costs, and we have been unable to continue carrying the resulting operating losses.”
In an interview with Business Insider on Wednesday, Villa Vie Residences founder Mikael Petterson called himself “the villain in the story.”
“Nobody that’s tried residential cruising has succeeded, and we have gone further than anyone else,” he said. “I think we would have been absolutely fine and we would have seen this through, if there was no Iran war.”
Red flags before the shutdown
In retrospect, Cassingham says there were a raft of red flags.
“I personally had red flags because when we would talk to Mikael, he could never look into the camera. His eyes were always shifting back and forth and mysterious—off into space.”
“Another red flag for me was the revolving door on their employees. Other red flags were invoices… Our monthly invoices were never correct. We always triple checked them if we could get them. Because they were using, it turns out, a spreadsheet to manage the company. Now I’m no bookkeeper, but I know a spreadsheet’s not what you use to manage a large business.”
Cassingham says she and her husband have no plans to come back to the U.S. at this point, especially since Randy is in the middle of treatment for prostate cancer. They want to see what happens with the ship, and Randy has further cancer tests in Thailand in December.
A group of passengers has formed an LLC and is looking into how they can possibly get the ship back into operating order. But for now, Cassingham thinks things won’t be resolved for at least another 60 to 90 days.
Some passengers are talking about a lawsuit, “and they’re not being shy it,” Cassingham says. “They’ll say that right in front of Mike and [CEO] Kathy [Villalba]. I’m not a lawsuit-happy person. If they had intentionally hurt us, I might have a different turn.”
“Mike and Kathy may have been incompetent,” she continued. “They definitely ignored all the good advice they got from people.”
Still, Cassingham seems sanguine about her current predicament. The yoga and meditation helps, as does her work as a transformation life coach.
“When the pioneers headed West from the East Coast, they didn’t know what was ahead of them,” she says. “You make it or you don’t.”
Realtor.com has reached out to Villa Vie Residences for comment.
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