Odyssey passengers complain of horrendous smell after toilets stopped flushing at start of cruise

A passenger on the “cursed” Odyssey cruise ship has given the vessel a damning new nickname after a series of problems, including not being able to flush the toilets and have a hot shower, plagued the ship for the first few days of its voyage.

Villa Vie Residences’ Odyssey cruise ship promised passengers a luxury around-the-world voyage, stopping at 425 ports in 147 countries across three and a half years.

After a series of delays, repairs and sea trials, the cruise departed at the end of September – four months later than their initial start time, leaving over a hundred passengers stranded in Belfast in the summer.

Now that the ship has set sail, the luxury all-inclusive cruise was not all that some passengers had hoped for after months of waiting to start their new lives in their residential cabins.

One passenger, Joe Rhodes, had nicknamed the ship “SS Clusterf***” after a claiming that a string of onboard problems started to arise once they began their journey.

Writing on his Substack on 14 October, Rhodes said that “every single thing, from the food to the furnishings, the TV channels to the swimming pools (neither of which are yet operational), have turned out to be something less than advertised.”

On the first night, he said that the hot water stopped working before the water was shut off entirely once they arrived in Brest, France, their first stop on the itinerary.

“Nothing from the taps, nothing from the showers and — most importantly — no way to flush the toilets. Most residents didn’t realise this — the shutdown happening in the middle of the night — until AFTER they’d made deposits, so to speak.

“Yep, we awakened to the faint smell of s*** marinating in a hundred unflushed bowls, wafting through the corridors, gently mixing with the ocean breeze,” he wrote.

Rhodes did say that it was only a matter of hours before the toilets were able to flush and the cold water running in the afternoon the following day, but the hot water did not return until their second day in Bilbao, Spain.

The passenger claimed that Villa Vie told them the water issues were due to the previous ship owners not installing the water tanks properly, meaning the waste tank filled up too quickly.

Since writing the blog post, and now the water issues have been fixed, Rhodes told The Telegraph that things aboard the Odyssey have gone much smoothly since living in Bilbao.

“No more problems with the hot water or non-flushing toilets. The food has gotten exponentially better and things are going pretty well, much closer to what we’d anticipated the cruise would be,” he said. “The beer is still terrible, though.”

Other passengers have said that while the Odyssey is experiencing some “unexpected glitches”, the issues are being “addressed and fixed on a regular basis”.

Writing on his online blog dedicated to the cruise, passenger Andy Garrison said that they are focusing a lot more on the good parts of the journey, and that issues such as one with the water tanks are not something the passengers have dwelled on.

“Nobody mentions it any more other than to laugh at how “cr****” that experience was for a while. It’s over,” he wrote.

Randy Cassingham, who is aboard this ship with his wife, Kit, told The Independent that there were a few problems with the water tanks but he did not once smell the putrid odours others claimed to have caught.

Cassingham explained that a delay which saw the ship anchored outside of Belfast for three nights meant the tanks filled up, and Villa Vie was not going to to dump raw sewage in the sea, so they paid for sewage trucks to offload the tanks at the first few stops.

“The thing to remember is, this is a shakedown cruise. One expects problems on a brand new ship, so to have a few problems early on with a recommissioned 30-year-old ship shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone,” he said.

He added that many passengers “resent” the problems being caused by “regulatory sticklers” that Villa Vie is then being blamed for and that there are many things onboard that are continuing to improve, such as an executive chef who takes suggestions from passengers and new hospitality staff being hired.

In a statement to The Independent, Villa Vie’s CEO, Mikael Petterson, said that due to being anchored outside in Belfast their “forward water tanks were full”.

“We transferred water to the rear overnight where we had to turn off water temporarily. This affected all water including toilets. This lasted ‘til the morning hours where residents did not have water when they woke up in the morning.

“Water was back on in the morning and has since been operational. Residents have been able to enjoy every port since.”

As for the issue with the swimming pools, Petterson added that they “needed complete replacement and over $700k of work” but will be operational by the time they reach the Caribbean.

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