Life At Sea Cruises, a spin-off of the 30-year old Miray Cruises, introduced a three-year cruise around the world for $30,000 a year. The ship for the voyage will be the MV Gemini, with 400 cabins and a capacity of 1,074 passengers. It will depart Nov. 1 from Istanbul and travel 130,000 miles, visiting 375 ports in 135 countries on seven continents. The stops include 103 tropical islands. More than 200 of the port stops will be overnight stays. The company is now taking bookings.
Milestones that will be visited along the way include the Taj Mahal, Chichen Itza, the Great Pyramids of Egypt, Rio de Janeiro’s Christ the Redeemer, the Great Wall of China and Machu Picchu.
When I first heard of the Life At Sea world cruise I chuckled. Who could do that, I wondered. It seemed almost unimaginably high-end, aimed at an intensely rarified target market. It seemed too good to be real. At first.
Seriously, who would do that? Who could? That’s a good question. Actually, come to think of it, probably quite a number of people would find it quite a nice arrangement. Remember, this is not the world of 2019.
Since the onslaught of Covid in 2020, we’ve all been forced to see and do things we never previously imagined. We have been forced to stretch our parameters of what we believe is within the realm of possibility. Whether it’s politics, technology or weather, it seems practically every week we must scrap our previously-held world view and build a new one that accommodates the latest impossibility that just became a reality. Increasingly it feels like we are living in a sci fi movie.
Covid wiped away the old world, and here we are, in the ruins of the old, with the next one sprouting up underfoot. I would bet that a whole lot more people would consider this three-year world cruise now than would have in 2019.
First, let’s look at the price. At first glance, the $30,000-a-year price tag seems steep. That’s $90,000 in total for the three-year cruise. It would definitely fall in the category of a high-ticket travel purchase. But it’s all in how you think about it.
I know people who have put all their things in storage in order to go traveling. I did it myself for a couple of years long ago. If you are looking for a studio apartment now in my home town of Hoboken, New Jersey, you must be prepared to spend $4,000 a month for rent. That’s $48,000 a year. And that doesn’t include food. Or maid service. That puts that $30,000 in a different perspective. That cruise is sounding better and better.
Considering that it’s room and board with housekeeping service, in a fabulous environment, traveling the world and checking off items on your bucket list, it doesn’t seem so expensive.
The most successful travel advisors have learned not to measure the buying power of clients according to their own financial horizons. Sometimes you may be surprised. The New York Times told us in 2005, “The people at the top of America’s money pyramid have so prospered in recent years that they have pulled far ahead of the rest of the population, an analysis of tax records and other government data by The New York Times shows. They have even left behind people making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Call them the hyper-rich.”
Those trends have only become more pronounced since that time. There’s a lot of money out there. Thirty thousand dollars may seem like a lot for a travel package, but in today’s financial terms, it’s not a lot of money.
I attended an event in Cape Canaveral in February 2007 where Virgin Galactic recognized 45 travel agents as the first Accredited Space Agents. They had successfully passed through the training that qualified them to sell Virgin Galactic’s suborbital flights, which were at that time expected to be operating by late 2008. Originally they had been projected to start in 2007. A number of the $200,000 tickets for the flights had already been purchased at that time.
I spoke to the travel agent who had sold the first ticket for a Virgin Galactic sub-orbital flight. The sale had been made in December to an investment banker who had just received a Christmas bonus of several million dollars. Two hundred thousand felt like pocket change for him at that moment.
Mel Dultz, who founded the luxury-adventure travel company Travcoa in 1954, told the story of a travel agency that put one of Travcoa’s $44,000 Around The World by Private Jet packages on the marquee as a joke. And damned if someone didn’t walk in and buy it. You never know. Might as well set your sights high.
When you boil it down, it’s not the price that’s the problem. It’s the time. Who has three years to spend on a ship?
Well, now in the age of remote everything, that’s not such a big leap either. Covid consummated the remote working revolution. It forced nearly every kind of work that could be done remotely to be done remotely. It wiped away prohibitions against remote working, and the sanctity of the office. That was one of many trends accelerated by Covid. Now most people can work from anywhere.
The Life At Sea Cruises folks know this and are taking pains to upgrade their onboard office facilities during the redesign of the ship that will be taking place in preparation for the world voyage. They are beefing up their on-board office accommodations.
I wonder how many people who have been taking their traveling offices to exotic locations for the last few years and are now ready to take a further plunge and commit to a circumnavigation of the globe as their base of operations for the next three years.
The more I think about it, the better it sounds. The classic sales pitch about cruises — that you only have to unpack once — imagine only having to pack once for three years! Meanwhile, your office is taking you literally around the world. Not too bad.
Great meals. Great housekeeping. It’s nice on a cruise. I always think when I am leaving a cruise ship, how nice it would be if we could take all that home. Well, maybe this is the way to do it. In reverse.
So you never know. We are in a time when everyone must expand their own parameters of the possible. Why not?
David Cogswell is a freelance writer working remotely, from wherever he is at the moment. Born at the dead center of the United States during the last century, he has been incessantly moving and exploring for decades. His articles have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Fortune, Fox News, Luxury Travel Magazine, Travel Weekly, Travel Market Report, Travel Agent Magazine, TravelPulse.com, Quirkycruise.com, and other publications. He is the author of four books and a contributor to several others. He was last seen somewhere in the Northeast US.
