Dropping anchor on the cruise of a lifetime
As the appetite for luxury cruising grows, seeking truly exceptional experiences comes with a ship-sized price tag
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A private driver arrives at your home to transport you to your cruise suite, where you are welcomed aboard with a glass of Dom Perignon and introduced to your personal butler — exhale, your luxury voyage has begun.
Welcome to a new level of luxury cruising where rare and remote experiences are the currencies and every opulence you thought you knew on land is also available at sea.
“The luxury experience at sea has started to fragment, it’s different things to different people,” says Joe O’Sullivan, managing director of small ship booking specialist, Cruise Traveller. “For some, it’s the whole ethos of the white glove service, the personal touches like the butler who remembers your favourite drink. But another big driver in the luxury market is experiences, the people who want to camp on the ice in Antarctica or paddleboard off the bow of the ship.”
We did all the hard work for you and found five of the most luxurious experiences you can have at sea in 2025 — and what they cost.
Live like a VIP at sea
Want to organise a private dinner for 12 in your suite? No problem. What about a night in a luxury hotel before the ship sails? Of course. A growing number of ships are offering that VIP treatment once reserved for world leaders and celebrities. And for the right price, your wish is their command.
The Owner’s Residence aboard an Explora Journeys ship is about as luxe as it gets on sea. We’re talking an outdoor terrace that extends the full width of the ship, marble ensuite with a large bathtub, private steam room and Dyson appliances and a butler that packs and unpacks, launders and presses your clothes like an old-school majordomo. Of course, this will set you back almost $200,000 per couple for a two-week cruise.
For a similar, though no less opulent experience, Explora Journeys have four categories of Ocean Residences below this.
“Explora Journeys is the luxury division of MSC Cruises, but don’t let the mass-market MSC brand put you off, this is like Volkswagen owning Porsche and Audi,” says Mark Trim, managing director of Flat Beds Tour + Cruise, who was lucky enough to spend two weeks in an Ocean Residence with his family earlier this year. “And whilst it is a small ship, there was a lot of space, and the wellness facilities, bars and shopping were also incredible, highlighted by the inclusion of the exclusive Rolex boutique on Deck 4.”
The VIP treatment aboard a Regent Suite on select Regent Seven Seas ships carries a price tag of around $16,000 a night. For this you get 413sqm of space (more than double the average ship suite) at the bow of the ship with ocean views from two wraparound balconies.
And forget an ensuite, in the Regent Suite, it’s called a master bathroom spa retreat and includes a treatment area, full sauna and multi-jet shower, heated relaxation loungers, a heated spa and unlimited, complimentary in-suite spa treatments.
You also get access to The Study, a Private Dining Room for up to 12 guests, and a night in a luxury hotel pre-cruise including breakfast and transfers.
A 14-day cruise from Monte Carlo to Rome in a Retreat Residence suite on Explora II departing May 2025 is from $22,650 a person twin share and from $74,000 a person twin share in an Owner’s Residence suite.
A night in a Regent Suite aboard Regent Seven Seas Explorer, Grandeur or Splendor is from $16,000.
Walk among penguins
There are a few things you can be sure of when you step onto remote Snow Hill off the east coast of Antarctica — you will be surrounded by thousands of Emperor penguins and you will be part of a select few to do so.
Getting access to Snow Hill, where up to 10,000 breeding penguins and their offspring live, is by helicopter only.
Five years ago, Scenic launched their discovery yacht class called Scenic Eclipse equipped with two onboard helicopters and a custom submersible to take travellers on these types of rare adventures.
“We’ve seen significant demand for immersive experiences, particularly for unique offerings like our helicopter excursions,” says Anthony Laver, Scenic Group general manager, sales and Marketing, APAC. “This growing interest reflects a broader trend towards intimate, immersive and ultra-luxury journeys that go beyond traditional cruising. And given its sleek yacht design, Scenic Eclipse is also capable of sailing into places many ships are not able to reach.”
The 22-day Antarctica, South Georgia and the Falkland Islands itinerary departing Buenos Aires in February 2025 is from $32,020 a person twin share. Helicopter excursions operate from this cruise at an extra cost.
Meet the Inuit
Go hunting on dog sleds with Inuit masters, set off on a polar hike and experience the midnight sun. It may sound clichéd, but these are just some of the once-in-a-lifetime experiences you can have onboard Ponant’s first luxury hybrid electric polar exploration ship, Le Commandant Charcot.
“Unlike more standard polar cruise activities, travellers won’t travel on Zodiacs very much at all, as everything is done by dog sled,” says Ponant expedition experience director, Jose Sarica. “The charm of this voyage to the far north-west of Greenland is that it offers some very immersive experiences in icebound landscapes, including hiking and snowshoeing, traditional Inuit kayaking, beluga and narwhal watching and even snorkelling through the ice in a wetsuit.”
The 11-day Inuit Spring of Ammassalik aboard Ponant’s Le Commandant Charcot departing May 2025 is from $26,180 a person twin share (polar trek experience $1550 extra).
The luxury of time
Is there anything more luxurious than time, philosophically speaking? What about if you combine it with a prolonged journey aboard a six-star ultra-luxury ship? Sign up for the experience with Silversea who feature a range of Grand category itineraries designed to let you immerse yourself in your destination.
One of their most popular voyages is the 47-day circumnavigation of Australia which visits 23 ports and includes door-to-door private transfers from your home, your own butler to cater to your needs at sea, as well as all shore excursions and business class airfares.
The 47-day Grand Australia voyage departing Melbourne in October 2025 aboard Silver Nova is from $51,200 a person twin share with door-to-door service.
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OpenAI has shelved the planned launch of GPT-6.1 Astra after internal tests raised concerns about deception and agents acting beyond user authorization, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company says it will investigate the issues and strengthen safety measures before releasing future models.
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OpenAI says it is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression.
The move follows a summer punctuated by reports of artificial-intelligence systems industrywide going rogue, and marks a rare case of a major AI developer ditching a new release because of safety concerns.
The company had planned to launch the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, in the coming days or weeks, aiming for an October debut. The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing.
The company instead will focus on improving the safety of future models, which it expects to be even more capable.
Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said in an interview that GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the model performed poorly on tests measuring alignment, or how well the model adheres to what humans would like it to do. Specifically, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: It wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.
Another issue was what OpenAI calls “scope authorization,” meaning that GPT-6.1 Astra would push ahead on a task without asking the user for permission, and would at times reach for external tools and services even if it might be unsafe.
“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain said. “You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”
While GPT-6.1 Astra improved in areas such as “model laziness,” Jain said it didn’t quite meet OpenAI’s bar for safety and alignment, so the company decided not to launch the model publicly.
The announcement comes one day ahead of OpenAI’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. In the past, OpenAI has used the conference as an opportunity to launch new models and services that reduce costs for software developers—a segment the ChatGPT-maker competes with rival AI company Anthropic to win over.
In recent weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have called on industry partners to slow down the development of cutting-edge AI models and invest in safety standards, noting they will temper the pace of their own internal AI progress.
OpenAI says it is working to investigate a range of agent security incidents that it has discovered in recent months, and address the safety issues underneath them. As part of the work, the company has implemented a new monitoring system to catch AI-agent misbehavior more quickly, and started requiring engineers to use stronger security guardrails for testing its AI systems.
Earlier this summer hundreds of OpenAI’s internal agents, which were tasked with completing a cybersecurity test, ended up hacking into the AI company Hugging Face. Since then, high-profile organizations such as the Australian government and United Nations discovered that OpenAI’s agents used similar, but less extensive, techniques to gain access to their websites.
Many of the publicly known agent-security incidents involved OpenAI’s internal AI models that were never slated for public release.
Last week, OpenAI said it paused training on its most capable AI models after an AI agent slipped through a gap in the company’s internet restrictions to query a public chatbot. The company said its new monitoring systems flagged the incident within 15 minutes, and training on these models remains paused.
GPT-6.1 Astra isn’t one of those models, but a different case, the company said.
“We want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Jain said. “But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”
While the company decided not to ship GPT-6.1 Astra, it hopes to use the same base model to do additional reinforcement learning runs, and create future generations of its GPT-6 models.
OpenAI plans to conduct several deep dives to identify the root cause of the problems identified in GPT-6.1 Astra, Jain said. The work includes ensuring that OpenAI’s reinforcement learning environments are rewarding the right type of behavior, Jain added, though she noted the company would investigate all stages of model development.
AI companies have begun to draw scrutiny from policymakers and public officials, who are paying attention to the rapid development of the technology. Later this week, a Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing with third party AI researchers titled, “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks.”
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, sued OpenAI in June, claiming that the company and Chief Executive Sam Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users.
In a motion for temporary injunction filed Monday, Uthmeier sought to prevent OpenAI from developing new AI models without third-party approved safeguards, stop ChatGPT from soliciting user engagement and limit the company’s ability to advertise ChatGPT as safe.
Tech companies claim they “cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government,” Uthmeier said in the filing. “The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help.”
An OpenAI spokeswoman said that people want to know AI is being developed safely, “and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves.”
“Governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI, and we’re committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company,” she said.
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