Who this is for
This is the first time a hotel brand went to sea under its own name, and it shows in what the product is not. There is no buffet, no theater putting on production shows, no formal night and no dress code beyond shirts and shoes. What there is instead is a very small vessel, a crew-to-guest ratio close to one to one, and a day structured like a resort’s rather than a cruise’s.
It suits people who already spend money on hotels and have avoided cruising because of what the word implies. It suits couples who want a week in French Polynesia or the Caribbean without organizing boats, and it suits anyone whose objection to cruise ships is the number of other people on them.
It is the wrong choice if you want evening entertainment, a full day of things to do at sea, a spread of dining rooms to work through, or value; the nightly rate sits alongside the most expensive lines afloat and the fare does not include the shore excursions.
What is actually different
The yachts are genuinely small. Evrima carries 298 guests in 149 suites. Ilma (2024) and Luminara (2025), both built at Chantiers de l’Atlantique in France and both LNG-powered, carry around 450 in a little over 220 suites. Every suite has a private terrace. For comparison, a large modern cruise ship carries between ten and twenty times that.
The marina. A platform folds down from the stern when the yacht is at anchor in calm water, and guests swim, kayak and paddleboard straight off it. The two newer yachts have a larger version with a mezzanine deck. This is the feature the line is built around and the reason the itineraries favor anchorages over industrial ports; it is also the feature most dependent on weather, and it does not open every day it is scheduled to.
Where they go. French Polynesia is the strongest part of the program: Papeete, Bora Bora, Moorea, Huahine and Taha’a appear more often than anything else in the schedule. Beyond that it is the Caribbean out of San Juan and Miami, the Mediterranean out of Athens, Rome, Monte Carlo and Venice, Asia out of Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore, Alaska out of Vancouver, and a handful of ocean crossings each year.
The delivery history is part of the story. The line was announced in June 2017 and Evrima was meant to sail in 2020. Her Spanish shipyard ran into financial trouble, the pandemic arrived on top of it, and the inaugural voyage was rescheduled eight times before she finally sailed in October 2022, more than two years late, and several years after the bookings first opened. The two French-built sisters that followed arrived on time. Ownership sits with a consortium led by Oaktree Capital, with Mohari Hospitality and the Singapore government; Marriott licenses the name rather than running the ships.
What to know before you book
Shore excursions are not included, and that is unusual at this price. Most of the ultra-luxury field either includes them outright or gives a credit. Here the fare covers dining, drinks including premium spirits and wines, gratuities, wifi and the marina watersports, but touring ashore is charged, and the private and small-group options are the expensive kind. Budget for it separately.
One restaurant costs extra. Four of the five dining venues are in the fare. Aqua, the Sven Elverfeld room, carries a supplement, as do the rarer wines and specialty spirits.
A small ship moves. Three hundred guests is yacht-sized in a real sense, and on an open-water day (a Caribbean crossing, a Pacific repositioning, the run between Tahiti and the Marquesas), you will feel the sea in a way you would not on a 140,000-ton vessel. The itineraries are chosen to minimize this and mostly succeed, but anyone prone to motion sickness should look at how many sea days a voyage carries before booking it.
The atmosphere is quiet by design. Days end early, there is no late venue and the evening is dinner and a bar. Children are carried from six months and there is a Ritz Kids program for four- to twelve-year-olds, but they are few and the yachts are not built around them. If your definition of a good vacation includes something happening after eleven, this is not it.