Kara Youssef and Joe Youssef sold two apartments, drained their savings, gave away most of their belongings, and left for Istanbul in late October for the trip of a lifetime. It’s a three-year round-the-world cruise scheduled to depart in November. .1.
But in late November, after months of behind-the-scenes turmoil, the cruise line canceled the trip and the Youssefs were stranded in Istanbul. No ship could survive the journey.
Miray Cruises, a Turkish company, announced this cruise. sea life, March. It was the longest cruise in history, with 382 port calls over 1,095 days, and claimed to provide opportunities for communities to form at sea and to explore the globe. Starlink Internet and Business Center allows passengers to work remotely.
The cruise seemed ideal for the post-pandemic era and was targeted at people craving an escape. With prices starting at $90,000 for an indoor cabin and reaching $975,000 for a suite, the trip even seemed like a bargain for some passengers, cheaper than living in many cities for three years.
Within the first month of sales, more than half of the ship’s 400 staterooms were booked. But putting together a cruise of this scale is a monumental task, requiring a ship large enough to carry hundreds of people, docking rights around the world, and securing funding.
The cruise collapsed like a high seas version of Fyre Festival, which promised extravagant music concerts in the Bahamas and delivered cold sandwiches and makeshift tents. Like the Youssefs, people are dissatisfied and confused. Despite promises of refunds, only a small portion has been refunded so far.
Mirei’s owner, Vedat Ugurul, said in an interview in December that the cruise cancellation was due to lack of funds and interest.
“We tried everything to find a solution, but at the end of the day we couldn’t attract investors and couldn’t sell enough cabins,” he said.
So Yusef, a 36-year-old former humanitarian worker from Ohio, and her husband sit in Istanbul with three suitcases and a carry-on, waiting for their $80,000 refund. become.
“They continued to guide us and give us hope until the last moment, days before we left,” she said. “We sold everything we had to make this dream come true. We feel completely defeated.”
It’s a big dream, but I don’t have a boat to ride on.
In June 2022, as the cruise industry was recovering from pandemic shutdowns, Miami-based entrepreneur Mikael Pettersson came up with the idea for a three-year cruise. Long cruises are not unheard of, but due to logistics they are usually only a year at most.
Mr. Pettersson had plans to visit destinations around the world. What he didn’t have was a boat. Through a broker, I was introduced to Millais International, which had been providing sailing and cruise operations services since 1996.
Miray owner Ugurul suggested MV Gemini. He bought the 400-cabin, 1,074-passenger ship in 2019 and used it primarily for travel between Turkey and the Greek islands.
Mr. Pettersson could not afford a ship, so the two groups decided to work together instead. He was in charge of marketing and Millais was in charge of operations.
In November 2022, Pettersson signed a three-month agreement to develop a new brand, Life at Sea Cruises. Although he had never seen Gemini, he said he trusted Millay’s nearly 30 years of experience.
Kendra Holmes, Miley’s vice president of business development and strategy at the time, said the company had a budget of about $10 million to not only refurbish the ship but also to renovate it for such a long cruise. She said she had the necessary experience and staff.
Pettersson said he visited Turkey in December 2022 and saw Gemini, but was focused on creating designs and renderings for marketing. He said that in the future he will carry out technical inspections.
“The configuration of the cabin was perfect for the pricing and affordability that we were marketing,” he said.
On March 1, 2023, Life at Sea began selling space on its cruises, attracting millions of clicks to its newly created website. “There was an explosion and we could barely keep up,” Pettersson recalled.
Many of the prospective passengers had never been on a cruise. Keri Whitman, a 56-year-old Cincinnati marketing executive, was looking for a change, a new community and adventure.
She loved being able to travel while still working. “This seemed like the perfect opportunity,” she said.
Whitman was one of the first to make an appointment in April. She had a lawyer investigate her company and found no red flags, so she put a $5,000 deposit on the $185,120 cabin and put her home on the market.
Refueling concerns: Is this vessel suitable?
When Pettersson returned to Gemini in April, questions arose about the ship and its itinerary. Will there be enough fuel on board to sail between the more distant ports? In a voice memo sent to the team, itinerary planner Robert Dixon said he was refused access to the engine room and the engineer He said he was told by the ship that the ship would not have enough fuel to cross the Atlantic on time. He also expressed his concerns about the South Pacific Trans-Pacific Plan.
“Even if we spent another $10 million on that ship, I don’t think it would be enough to do what we want to do,” Dixon said in the recording. He declined to be interviewed.
Additionally, there was a question about the size of Gemini. If the cruise’s capacity of 1,074 people is sold out, will there be enough space for three years of relaxing and working, as many of the people had planned?
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During the questions about Gemini, tensions began to rise. Mr. Pettersson’s team complained that it could not process credit card transactions and did not have an escrow account to secure deposits, which is common in the United States.
Millay expected the sales team to collect the entire freight upfront, but asking for hundreds of thousands of dollars at once was prohibitive. Mr. Pettersson introduced an installment plan, which helped increase sales, but it caught the eye of Millay, who was not ready for it. And there was no account in the US for the sales team to use to secure reservations.
Miray’s principal, Mr. Ugurul, operates a pizza parlor in Orlando, Florida, and Mr. Petterson said the company asked him to deposit the first payment into the store’s account. Holmes said it was suggested as a temporary solution.
Millay had been exploring other ways to accept payments, including using the online payment platform Square, but after Millay’s dispute with Square, Pettersson, concerned that the company didn’t have a safe way to hold deposits. asked for a full refund. customer deposit. Passengers canceled reservations for at least 25 cabins because they feared their cruise was at risk.
“We were very nervous.”
In May, amid the turmoil, the Youssefs attended a webinar for prospective passengers but were told nothing about payment issues. The couple was confident their cruise would depart on November 1st, even if they were on a different ship. She posted a $5,000 deposit on May 6th and was told that her 25% payment was due on June 7th.
By then, Mr. Pettersson had left the company. The internal squabbles were made public on an app created for the cruise and on a Facebook page. Pettersson told passengers that Life at Sea was being dismantled and that the Millay was refusing to answer important questions.he He urged passengers to file complaints with U.S. maritime authorities.
Millay’s Mr. Holmes depicts Mr. Pettersson as the loser in a power struggle. “They’re trying to sink the whole ship because someone can’t be the captain,” she said. She became CEO of Life at Sea and began working to reassure passengers.
Confusion and panic arose among the passengers, many of whom had already begun to be uprooted from life. “We were very nervous. At first he went through one webinar with the departed team, and then he sat down with Kendra Holmes,” Youssef recalls.
But over the next few weeks, Youssef said he became more comfortable as Holmes and his team held daily webinars focused on acquiring new ships.
“Kendra was very persuasive and dedicated,” Youssef said. “Whereas Michael promised us the sun and the moon, she was very pragmatic.”
in a webinar On May 31, Holmes said the company had decided not to open an escrow account. He said another way to protect passenger deposits is through deposits filed with the Federal Maritime Commission, a U.S. agency that helps regulate maritime transportation. However, no bail was posted.
Battle for new ships and investors
In early July, Life at Sea announced that it had acquired a 627-room vessel and named it MV Lara “due to unprecedented demand.” In reality, the company put down a deposit and, with the help of investors, negotiated the purchase of Lara, at a cost that Mr. Ugur later suggested was between $40 million and $50 million.
At the time, Mary Rader, a 68-year-old former social worker in Westchester County, New York, said she asked her travel agent to look into Millay Cruz and was told it had good reviews. When one of her couples offered to transfer their cabin to her at a discounted rate, she took the opportunity and withdrew $80,000 from her retirement savings.
Rader said she made two payments, one for $50,000 and one for $35,000, but never received a receipt and the couple never received a refund. Eventually she got her boarding pass, but her cruise app listed her and the couple in the same cabin.
“At this point, the red flags started to show up, but I was stuck because I had already paid the bill,” she said.
In September, the Youssefs sold their apartment to pay for the cruise. Some began applying for visas, shipping luggage to Istanbul, and arranging for pets.
At this point, only 111 of the ship’s 627 rooms had been sold, but passengers who signed up were guaranteed that the ship would sail even with just two passengers.
On September 26, the day the payment was scheduled to be made to secure the Lara, Holmes received a call from Ugurul, the owner of the Mirei, informing him that the lead investor had declined, but that he was working on other candidates. I was told. After receiving several cancellation requests, Holmes posted on the cruise app that, per the terms of the contract, passengers who canceled now would only receive a 10% refund.
By October 27, just days before the cruise was scheduled to depart, 30 passengers were in Istanbul ready to board, but the company announced it would postpone the cruise to November 11 and depart from Amsterdam. . A few days later, departure was again postponed to November 30th.
On November 16, Youssef learned in the newspaper that the Lara had been acquired by another company. “She felt frustrated and stuck with no information other than what she had found on her own,” she said. Holmes resigned from Millais on the same day.
On November 19, Ugurlu issued a statement saying that investors had withdrawn due to unrest in the Middle East. The next day, Millay confirmed that the cruise had been cancelled.
waiting for refund
The next day, passengers were asked to sign an agreement with Millais that would spread their refunds over three months, from December to February. The first deadline passed on December 22, and only some passengers received their money. Millais said the delay was caused by banks requesting additional documentation.
The Youssefs said on Dec. 28 that they had not yet received their refund. For the past month, they have been living in a hotel in Istanbul at the cruise company’s expense.
“We could soon become homeless,” Youssef said.
Millais, Holmes and Pettersson are currently working separately on another three-year cruise, set to launch next year.
Rader, a retired social worker, is not hopeful. “I haven’t received anything yet, but I never expected it to arrive,” she said. “My guess is that the company will close down or be restructured and what I deposited in cash will never be paid out.”
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