Ohio woman Keri Witman sells home to fund 3-year luxury cruise, only for company to cancel trip

No tickets to paradise.

An Ohio woman sold her home to experience the trip of a lifetime on a $32,000 luxury cruise that would’ve taken her across the globe — only for it to never happen.

Keri Witman, the head of a marketing agency Clever Lucy, said everything turned for the worse after Life at Sea Cruises on Nov. 17 notified her that they had to cancel the trip due to not being able to secure a ship for the voyage.

“I’ve been working over the last eight months to really get everything in line, my life organized, so that I can make it happen,” Witman said to The Enquirer. “It was really disappointing to find out it wasn’t going to pan out.”

The dream luxury cruise trip offered travelers a stay on board for three years while the ship made stops in 148 countries and visited 382 ports across every continent.

The Life at Sea Cruise trip, scheduled to depart from Istanbul, advertised they would provide food, travel, internet access, medical care, and more for prices starting at $30,000 per year for each guest, the cruise website showed.

Witman told the outlet she wanted to do the trip because it would give her the opportunity, as a mostly remote worker, to travel across the world while still being able to run her company.

Witman sold her home and signed a short-term lease for an apartment to reserve her room, which cost $38,500, according to the outlet.

“I called everybody, I kept expecting someone to tell me that (this was a bad idea) and I called my financial investment folks, and they’re like, ‘You should do it,’” Witman recalled. “Like, these guys are the most conservative financial people, I cannot believe they’re telling me I should do it.”

Problems arose when Life at Sea Cruise, originally scheduled to leave on Nov. 1, notified passengers of having to push back the departure date multiple times.

The cruise company had plans to purchase a Carnival Corp. ship called AIDAaura, but a different company secured the ship.

Witman became frightened and didn’t know what to make out of the multiple pushbacks for when the cruise line would finally depart.

“It was just in a spot where you didn’t want to plan anything forward,” Witman said. “Once I knew it was a question, I was like, ‘Do I make a (dinner) reservation for January?’”

Life at Sea Cruise announced it is offering refunds to all passengers from Dec. 1 up until February 2024 in monthly installments, an Instagram post from Miraycruises announced in Turkish.

Other customers were furious about the abrupt cancellation from the luxury cruise line, as some claim to not even have a place to stay because of it.

“There’s a whole lot of people right now with nowhere to go, and some need their refund to even plan a place to go – it’s not good right now,” one passenger told CNN.

“I’m very sad, angry and lost,” another passenger said. “I had the next three years of my life planned to live an extraordinary life, and now [I have] nothing. I’m having a hard time moving forward.”