Megan Singleton: BloggerAtLarge.com writer on retirement cruise gap years

There's a new travel trend gaining popularity among older people, and it can be affordable if you do the sums.

People are spending their first years of retirement living on cruise ships before downsizing to retirement villages - or buying a residence on one of the new residential cruise ships.

BloggerAtLarge.com writer Megan Singleton explained further.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talks EDB Travel with Wendy Wuturs. Where the
world is yours.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
For now it is time to talk travel. We're joined
by Meghan Singleton.

Speaker 3 (00:20):
Hello. Hello.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
I love your topic today because I can remember was
it one World a cruise ship or something that it
kind of announced the world the world many years ago,
like buy an apartment and then you can kind of
retire on our ship, And I thought, okay, it's an
interesting idea. I think I thought it was an interesting
idea before we hit things like coronavirus and stuff like that.

Speaker 3 (00:41):
Oh yeah, and novirus and virus and just ruins my
whole segment.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
Okay, no, no, but just forget that, forget all that. No,
but I think it's a really interesting idea, and so
you can.

Speaker 3 (00:50):
I'm calling it the retirement gap year, because how cool
would that be to think, right when I turned sixty
five or whatever age you've decided you're going to retire,
I'm going to take a gap year. And now some people,
as we know, by a camper van and tiki tour
around the country or around Australia, wherever they're going to go.
What about a year of back to back cruising or

(01:10):
as you say, buy an apartment on one of these
cruise ships. And so I've crunched some numbers on how
to do it, how affordable, how much you would need
to spend, and it's actually surprisingly doable. I'm getting pretty
excited at I haven't spoken to my husband yet, who
does actually suffer from seasickness. So it might not really
work for us, but I think it's going to work

(01:32):
for others.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
Okay, took me through it.

Speaker 3 (01:35):
Okay, So if you see some people, especially if they've
come out of the travel industry, they're retiring, but what
they've loved about what they did for work was putting
itineries together. Some people love spending months and months doing
research on where you want to go. Some people want
an agent to do it all for them. That's fine,
but I love the idea of doing my research. So
you would do back to back cruises onto all your

(01:57):
bucket list destinations, like I'd be putting Alaska in there.
I'd have a Christmas Markets river cruise, I might do
the Amazon whatever, and I would fly I do these cruises.
I'd work out all the itinerary timings, and then I'd
have a little bit of budget for maybe Airbnbs for
a week or even a couple of a month if
I wanted somewhere. You just have to beware of visas. Okay,

(02:19):
so we're just going to take that out of the
equation because it spoils the drama. And yeah, and so
then I would do all these cruises, but I've got
some sort of good number crunching for ways to save
some money. Like repositioning cruises are super affordable, usually really long,
Like they might need to be bringing a ship saved
from Alaska to New Zealand to start the summer season

(02:42):
down here, and you could be finding yourself cruising all
the way down the Pacific, you know, around Tahiti, coming
all the way down to here, and you could be
spending a month on something really affordable. So I've worked
out that for two people to comfortably cruise back to
back for a year, and that's going to include all
your food obviously, all your transport, about one hundred and

(03:05):
sixty to two undred thousand.

Speaker 2 (03:07):
Okay, you could rent.

Speaker 3 (03:09):
Your house out. You could maybe decide you're going to
squirrel that money away for your gap year. I love it.
Now you're talking about buying the apartment on the World,
which is a good starts at three point five million
US dollars, Reagan. But I have found another cruise ship
that sells residential apartments called Villa v Odyssey, and they

(03:30):
started about two hundred K. And then you pay a
monthly fee that covers like the food and the other
onboard things. And that's even doable. But what you are
then you are on that ship. You're stuck on that ship.
You're doing their itineraries. You don't have any say in it.
So I think I quite like my first option, which
is just open up the map and decide where you
want to go, choose different cruise lines. I've given a

(03:51):
list of like the medium priced cruise lines. We're not
talking cheap, and we're not talking inside cabins, because you
could do it for cheaper than what I've just said
if you didn't mind inside cabins. But no, I want
a balcony. Thanks. Yeah, how fun.

Speaker 2 (04:05):
I love it. And this is all in a blog, yes,
I think it is okay. Blogger at large dot com
is where you will be able to read all about it.

Speaker 1 (04:13):
For more from the Sunday Session with Francesca Rudkin. Listen
live to News Talks A B from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio