A cruise ship that left more than 200 passengers stranded in Cambodia last month after suspending its round-the-world voyage has been impounded in Singapore.
The Odyssey, operated by US-based Villa Vie Residences, was placed under arrest on Sunday after arriving from the Cambodian port city of Sihanoukville, according to Channel News Asia.
“The vessel has been placed under arrest pursuant to a court order,” Singapore’s Maritime and Port Authority confirmed in a statement on Monday.
“The crew onboard are reported to be well and arrangements for their welfare and wellbeing are being managed by the vessel's creditors. There are no passengers on board."
The ship is currently anchored in Singaporean waters, the MPA added.
The ship was impounded at Changi General Purpose Anchorage off Singapore's east coast on Sunday morning.
The action was taken under a court order secured through the Singapore law firm Helmsman LLC, although it was not yet clear who the firm was representing or what the claim that prompted the arrest argued.
Villa Vie reportedly owes a supplier in the region $500,000 (£371,774), and a source familiar with the matter told CBS News that a fuel supplier was most likely behind the legal action.
The Odyssey was supposed to offer guests something more permanent than a holiday. It was meant to be a home from which passengers could travel the world indefinitely.
Villa Vie had marketed cabins for sale at between $120,000 (£89,225) and $440,000 (£327,161), with residents able to buy cabins outright, sign up for five-year stays, or rent rooms for shorter periods.
The ship left Belfast in October 2024 on what was billed as a three-and-a-half-year voyage across 150 countries.
However, Villa Vie said on 27 October the cost of fuel had risen sharply in the regions where the Odyssey was operating, with monthly expenditure per cabin climbing from an average of $1,800 (£1,338) to an estimated $6,000 (£4,461) to $8,000 (£5,948) in parts of Asia.
“Since the conflict began in late February, we have taken significant steps to reduce fuel consumption, including slowing the itinerary and spending more time in port,” the operator said in a statement, referring to the US-Israeli war against Iran. “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.”
It added that passing the full increase on to residents was “not a realistic solution”.
“For us, when our monthly expenses go up from $400,000 (£297,419) to $2m (£1.49m) where are we going to get the $1.6m (£1.19m)?” the company’s chief executive, Mikael Petterson, told CBS News in October.
Mr Petterson said the company had tried to keep the ship running by borrowing money and delaying payments, but were “at a point where it's just at a breaking point where we need capitalisation”.
He also said the company planned to file for bankruptcy in the US.
In August, when the Odyssey was docked in Singapore, residents were asked to help raise money to keep it sailing.
Darrell Carp, a resident who said he had lost $250,000 (£185,887), said passengers had not been fully aware of the scale of the company's debts. “There's no question that we ran out of money in Singapore,” he said.
“We never fully understood the level of their debt. They were already behind on their payments on crew, and provisions, and fuel, and things like that.”
Another passenger paid around $400,000 directly to a fuel supplier from a personal bank account.
The crisis came to a head on 28 October, when all 203 passengers were given mere hours to pack their belongings and leave the 200m vessel in Sihanoukville in Cambodia.
Some of them had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for cabins they expected to occupy for years, while others had sold their homes to finance life aboard the ship.
Kit Cassingham, who paid over $370,000 (£275,113) for the cabin she shared with her husband Randy, told News Nation that she had seen “red flags all along”, dating back to August when passengers had to pool in money to buy fuel to leave Singapore.
The ship left Cambodia without its passengers on 4 November. At least 98 former residents of the ship were still in the country at the time, according to local authorities, while others had gone elsewhere in the region or returned home.
A group of residents subsequently tried to buy the vessel and continue the voyage, but their attempt failed after a lender declined to provide financing.
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