My friends signed up for this tour. The account in the NYT is pretty accurate and even gives some additional details that the articles published in the first week of Nov. do not have.
IME from talking to my friends and reading these articles is that everything went to pieces when the first ship was deemed inappropriate and that is when Miray started speaking out of both sides of their mouth.
For example, they claimed there was nothing wrong with the original ship but they were buying the new ship because it was slightly bigger and they wanted to respond to "unprecedented" demand. Except they had only planned to sell 80% of the cabins and they did sell that many. For the new ship, they ended up only selling 50% of the cabins. So they were lying about why they bought the new ship or at least fudging the details.
Another example was when the sale of the new ship fell through, the owner of Mirary Cruises (Vedat Ugurlu) met with the people in Istanbul and said what my friends described as "We're going to sail on Dec 1st. Unless we aren't." So they were still fudging and giving people hope when they shouldn't.
Oh, and they kept saying the sale of the new ship was delayed because of a funds transfer "taking longer than expected" and "we expect it to go through next week" even though what really happened is that they did not even have the money and were looking for investors. Not to mention, they had lost their investor before Oct 7th so it had nothing to do with the "situation" in the Middle East.
Some people who are into cruising have been snickering about how dumb the people who put down deposits were because who does that when there isn't a ship? And that the cruise was priced too low and people should have realized that. But I don't agree.
First of all, there was a ship at first. Secondly, it's true that the cheapest cabin was $30k a year which is only about $82 a day and that's not enough to run a cruise. But there weren't that many $30k cabins. The most expensive cabins were more like $192k a year which is more like $520/day. Who knows what the mix was and if the average per day ended up being similar to other cruises. Third, Miray is an established cruise line with a good reputation.
However, I do wonder about the people who sold everything and used their life savings to do this cruise and even quit their jobs. That seems pretty risky given that no company had done a cruise of this length before and also what if you realized part-way through the cruise that this isn't for you but you've signed a 3-year contract? Plus, how are you going to retire if you've spent your life savings already?
My friends said that they had put down about 6-months of payments as a deposit and that the way payments were structured, they would never be more than 6 months ahead and that they could afford to lose that amount and were therefore going to stick it out and see how it turns out. They enjoyed their time in Turkey and are now in Australia and who knows where they will go next. They've rented out their house and put most of their stuff in storage so they are going to use the money they would have spent on the cruise to travel around the world.
The article mentioned that the people involved are working on other 3-year world cruises. The former CEO of Miray (Kendra Holmes) who jumped ship in Nov is working for a company that runs a "boutique" cruise organized around gems and precious metals. IOW, they spend the entire cruise trying to sell you gold bars and rubies.
They also do not have a ship appropriate for a world cruise but claim they have one they'll use to explore Europe until they can get a bigger ship. The rest of the Life at Sea people formed Villa Vie Residences and you can buy cabins or just sign up for a segment as a typical cruiser. They seem more legit than Kendra Holmes' operation but all these multi-year/residence cruise companies are having issues getting started.
Companies like Storylines are launching condos-at-sea that will continuously sail around the world. Most are facing delays and don't have a ship yet.
www.businessinsider.com
P.S. Just read that Miray Cruises is saying that the cruise isn't canceled just postponed until May 2024. Sure, Vedat Ugurlu.
