If I got £1 for every person I meet aboard Four Seasons 1 who tells me they don’t usually do cruises, I’d be a very wealthy woman. Actually, there are only 195 people on my cruise, I mean yacht, so I wouldn’t be that wealthy.
To clear up the cruise/yacht conundrum. This 679ft-long, 15-deck vessel, which cost about £330m to build, has “notions”, as my Irish friends would say. It thinks it’s a yacht but everyone else knows no real yacht would carry 195 guests. Clearly the Four Seasons branding team has settled on “yacht” because it sounds fancier.
However, having just joined a seven-night Dalmatian Coast itinerary (Venice to Dubrovnik), there is no denying this sleekly elegant, all-suite ship – designed to feel like Aristotle Onassis’s famous private yacht Christina O – is giving superyacht vibes. And with a one-to-one staff-guest ratio, perfectly pitched Four Seasons service and the fact that it is small enough to glide into tucked-away locations, I forgive them.
Four Seasons is one of those hotel brands people get obsessed with, insisting on staying in one wherever they are in the world – even more so since its starring role in HBO comedy-drama White Lotus. But will its devotees follow it to sea, and will it be able to deliver the same levels of quality?
The team behind it includes hotel designer of the moment Martin Brudnizki and Prosper Assouline, arbiter of beautiful coffee-table books, many about hotels. It’s also got cutting-edge marine technology, including stabilisers that almost entirely cut out the pitching and rolling you sometimes get at sea.
My Superior Seaview Suite is one of the smallest (at 473sq ft) but is still enormous, as lovely as some of the top hotel rooms I’ve stayed in, and comes with a spacious private terrace with a daybed. A week-long cruise costs from around $27,000 (£21,000) per suite. At the top end, the 0.1 per cent can book the three-bedroom, four-deck Funnel Suite for $200,000 or more.
Stand-out features, besides Four Seasons’ signature mattress and pillows, include a beautiful sunbeam-inspired marquetry headboard, a glass cabinet of interesting marine-inspired items and a floor-mounted Bang & Olufsen TV which becomes transparent when switched off so as not to spoil the view.
The ship has 15 decks so it never feels crowded. There are 11 restaurants and bars, including the good poolside coastal Mediterranean Terrasse, excellent at-counter Japanese omakase restaurant Miuna and imaginative fine dining Sedna. Then there are more relaxed spaces like The Salon, a book-filled drawing room with live music each evening, the Horizon Lounge, which has a large plunge pool, and a coffee bar called Pistachio.
The excellent spa has sauna and steam rooms, cold plunges, ice fountains and a cryotherapy chamber, in which I spend three thrilling minutes, overseen by the delightful, tattooed resident wellness coach, Boban, who also hosts daily morning stretch classes on deck. The relaxation room has daybeds facing giant portholes overlooking the sea. The ship also has a kids’ club, daily lego-building challenges and table tennis tournaments.
One element raising a few eyebrows is the fact that, unlike its competitors, breakfast is the only meal included in the price (plus snacks and non-alcoholic drinks in the mini bar). This potentially means a large additional bill at the end, but it also encourages people to go for local meals when in port.
“We have had the benefit of a lot of analytics to steer the decisions we’ve made,” Ben Trodd, chief executive of Marc-Henry Cruise Holdings, joint owner of Four Seasons Yachts. “Our guests see true luxury as the ability to choose and make individual, often last-minute choices about where they’d like to eat.”
While a majority of guests are Four Seasons regulars, others are seasoned cruisers looking to upgrade the experience, or simply deep-pocketed newbies who don’t fall into either category.
“I’m spending my kids’ inheritance and loving every minute of it,” Doug, a recently retired Chicagoan, tells me in the Horizon Lounge hot tub. “I’d never been on a cruise before this year. I’ve now been on four, including a Ritz-Carlton one, which I loved by the way, but this is a cut above.”
Every itinerary includes a Marina Day, where the boat moors in a quiet cove and slides out two sea-level decks, one with a seawater pool carved out of it – including a net floor to protect swimmers from jellyfish – and the other for sunbathing. Here, guests can use complimentary paddle-boards, kayaks and futuristic eFoils.
“You’re on a cruise without feeling like it’s a cruise,” says Alexa, a lawyer from New York who I get chatting to at the Champagne and Caviar bar one evening. She is travelling with her husband and two teenage kids. “We love the Four Seasons brand so we were really excited to come. It’s been fabulous so far.”
What, no quibbles from the hard-nosed New York attorney? “My only concern has been the health and safety element on Marina Day. With so many people out on the water, how can they ensure our safety?” I knew it. “Saying that, we tested them by veering outside the recommended area in our kayaks and someone on a speedboat whizzed over immediately and guided us back in.”
There are definitely a few kinks to iron out, but there always are with new products. For example, the tiny bathrobes make everyone who isn’t petite (including me) feel like Godzilla and the shore-based excursions need a bit more work.
“We were quite shocked by the excursion prices,” Mel, from Harrogate, tells me on the tender back from our day in the pretty Croatian seaside town of Opatija. “So I did a bit of research and we organised our own for half the price.”
I’m given an excellent guided tour of the town with an engaging local called Nikola, then enjoy an excellent meal in a stylish waterfront restaurant, but the cost of that package is $675pp, which does feel steep. Someone else I spoke with booked an excursion to the island of Krk, but wasn’t advised in advance that it would involve a car transfer of an hour and a half in both directions.
Four Seasons is not the only luxury hotel group to have gone into boats. Ritz-Carlton has launched three since 2022. Aman will launch one next summer. Interestingly, about a third of the Four Seasons crew have jumped ship from Ritz-Carlton. Everyone I spoke to said they were both great to work for but that Four Seasons paid better.
Only time will tell whether this proves to be more than just a floating Four Seasons hotel. But humans are naturally social creatures and, in the same way that a lot of wealthy people would rather stay in a buzzy hotel than a private villa, I think as many would rather be on a high-end cruise like this than rattling around on a private yacht.
Francesca Syz was a guest of Four Seasons Yachts. The next seven-night itinerary aboard Four Seasons 1, departing Aug 16, costs from $36,120 per suite; a Mediterranean cruise at the end of October starts at $26,700.