My novella, His To Claim, was part of the anthology Kisses & Kink, released in June 2022 (no longer available). The common denominator shared by the stories in that collection was the setting. The stories took place on cruise ships.
With no more than that to go, I let my imagination loose.
I didn’t see one ship. I saw three.
The first was a catamaran around the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. I’ve done that trip so I didn’t need to do a lot of research for part I of my book. The catamaran I sailed on hosted 10 guests and was run by 3 onboard staff.
The second part took place on a ship more like the ones that come to mind when someone says ‘cruise ship’ - a floating village, population just under 5,000 (3,500 guests & 1,300 staff). I’ve seen these giants from land but I’ve never been on one so I had to research how they operate.
The final ship in my story was based on the National Geographic ships, which are a fraction of the size of the big liners, carrying as few as 60-120 passengers. Being so much smaller, they can explore points where the big ships can’t go.
All of that left me with a fascination about cruise ships and the pampering they offer. This past week I came across this article from the Miami Herald, written by Anna Jean Kaiser. Prepare to enter another dimension.

Here are some of the highlights of the article in case you missed it:
With the help of Miami cruise industry veterans, the Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts is entering the luxury cruise business with a high-end, 95-suite mega yacht slated to hit the ocean in 2025.
“This is going to be an extraordinary, unique, hybrid product. It has no equal — there is no such animal in cruising and nothing like it in yachting,” said Four Seasons Yachts CEO Larry Pimentel, a Miami cruise executive with decades of experience running luxury cruise ships, including Carnival Corporation’s Seabourn and Azamara, formerly part of the Royal Caribbean family.
“I was tasked with creating the best product at sea; it’s a tall order, but an exciting one,” he said, explaining that he was told not to create a cruise ship or a copy of a yacht. “We created our own vision of what the best product at sea could be.”
Four Seasons Yachts, whose corporate headquarters is in Miami, will be a three-ship fleet, with the first yacht debuting in November 2025, the second in 2026 and the third in 2027. Italian ship builder Fincantieri is building the yachts, which will cost a combined $1.2 billion. The first ship will cost a staggering $4.2 million per suite to build and have room for about 200 passengers.

Four Seasons’ cabins won’t be your average cruise ship suites. Starting at 590 square feet, some suites will have modular walls for families and groups to combine rooms. Some will have their own swimming pools and certain ones will have attached “staff cabins” for guests who have security guards, caretakers or nannies accompanying them. The largest cabin will be the “funnel suite,” a 9,600-square-foot, four-story suite with glass walls facing the ocean.
The yacht will come with 11 bars and restaurants, a spa and fitness center. The yacht’s main swimming pool floor will be able to rise up, spilling the water out and creating a flat space for shows, events and weddings.
[…]

The Four Season’s seafaring venture comes as competing luxury hotelier Ritz-Carlton debuted its first luxury yacht in October. But Pimentel and Levine say, while they think the Ritz-Carlton yacht will do well, they believe their Four Seasons ships cater to a different, higher-paying clientele. They also pointed out that the Ritz-Carlton’s yachting line is a licensing agreement, unlike their partnership.
Pimentel and Levine say it’s too early to share details on the cost of sailing on a Four Seasons yacht, but said it will be comparable to the pricing at Four Seasons hotels and resorts.
When completed in late 2025, the first yacht will sail the Mediterranean in the summer and the Caribbean in the winter. But you’re less likely to see the Four Seasons yachts in the traditional cruise mega ports, where thousands of passengers are unloaded onto an island for a few hours or a day.
“You will not see us in those ports,” Levine said. “We are a yacht, a mega yacht. We’ll be visiting smaller, less accessible ports around the Caribbean. On a cruise, the cruise [line] tells you what you’re gonna do. On Four Seasons Yachts, you tell us what you’d like to do.”
Read the full article here.