The À La Carte Experiment: Four Seasons Takes Hotel Economics to Sea

Ultra-luxury cruising has spent two decades converging on a single commercial idea: put everything in the fare. Drinks, dining, gratuities, often excursions and flights. The pitch is frictionlessness — you board, and money disappears as a subject.

Four Seasons I, which entered service in March 2026, does the opposite. Wi-Fi, gratuities and a full breakfast buffet are included. Almost everything else is charged, as it would be in a Four Seasons hotel. The company suggests guests budget roughly US$250 per person per day for food and beverage — on top of a fare that starts near US$28,000 per suite for a Mediterranean week.

It is the boldest structural decision in the new wave of hotel-brand yachts, and it deserves to be argued on its merits rather than dismissed.

The case for it

The reasoning, as articulated by the ship's general manager to a journalist sailing in June 2026, is twofold. First, this is a port-intensive product; many guests will dine ashore in Portofino or on a Greek island, and inclusive pricing forces them to pay twice. Second, guests at this level dislike prepaying for consumption they cannot predict — a teetotal couple subsidising a heavy-drinking one is a transfer, not a courtesy.

Both points are sound, and they are more honest than the alternative. "All-inclusive" at the top of the market has never meant free; it means averaged. The Four Seasons model simply declines to average.

All-inclusive pricing is not generosity. It is cross-subsidy with better marketing.

The case against it

The difficulty is psychological, and it is not trivial. Published prices from that sailing include oysters at US$28, a Caesar salad at US$20, house-made pasta at US$28, fish of the day at US$60 and a rib-eye at US$80; in the French room, an egg and truffle parfait at US$66 and a Poulet de Bresse at US$58. A thirteen-course omakase runs US$195 per person. A negroni is US$26, or US$130 with vintage gin. A massage is US$270. Breakfast in your suite, rather than the included buffet, adds US$30.

None of these are outrageous for the segment. Collectively, they create a running meter — and a running meter is precisely the friction that inclusive pricing was designed to remove. A guest who has paid US$28,000 for a week and then hesitates over a US$130 cocktail is experiencing something other than ease.

There is also an equity wrinkle the model creates rather than solves: the same reviewer noted guests collecting complimentary sandwiches from the coffee shop before 11am. When a US$28,000 fare produces sandwich arbitrage, the pricing architecture is doing something to behaviour.

What the money does buy

Space, unambiguously. The ship is 679 feet and carries 95 suites; on the sold-out sailing in question there were 204 passengers and 210 crew — better than one crew member per guest. The reviewer's observation is the telling one: the vessel could comfortably hold 500. The smallest accommodation, the Seaview Suite, is 473 square feet with a terrace. The largest, a four-storey Funnel Suite, runs to some 10,000 square feet and has commanded upwards of US$330,000 for a week.

The design is serious — interiors by Tillberg Design of Sweden with contributions from Prosper Assouline and Martin Brudnizki, and a 66-foot canoe-shaped pool whose floor rises to become a dance floor, an explicit homage to Onassis's Christina O. Four Seasons is doubling down on this thesis: Four Seasons II, due in 2028, will carry fewer suites — 79 — in order to add more of the largest ones.

Where it is still finding its feet

A first season is a first season, and the published first-hand account is candid. On the twelfth sailing since launch, the cuisine was described as "at times on point, at times a work in progress" — overcooked pasta, undercooked white asparagus, a truffle dish in which the truffle could not be tasted. The fitness centre is thin for a ship of this size. Evening programming largely stops around 10.30pm. And some of the decor choices puzzle: embroidered chairs sharing a corridor with plastic classical busts.

Guest reports elsewhere have included the complaint that a premium suite came without meaningful personal attention — the sort of inconsistency that a brand built on service consistency cannot afford for long, and precisely the thing a shakedown season is for.

Who should book it

Yes, if you are the kind of traveller who wants space above all, intends to eat ashore in port, prefers to structure your own days, and genuinely does not want to prepay for someone else's wine. On those terms the model is not merely defensible — it is better value than an inclusive fare you would under-consume.

No, if the pleasure of a holiday depends on never seeing a price. If a signature-required cocktail at 9pm will bother you, this architecture will bother you for a week, and one of the inclusive ultra-luxury lines will make you happier at a similar all-in cost.

The one thing we would not do is book it on the assumption that the fare is the cost. For a couple, a week of ordinary indulgence at the published prices adds several thousand dollars. Budget it properly and the experiment is a fair one; budget it as inclusive and it will feel like a bait and switch it is not.

Modelling the real cost of a week

The most useful thing an advisor can do with this product is refuse to quote only the fare. Here is a defensible estimate for two people over seven nights, using the operator's own guidance and published onboard prices.

Start with a Seaview Suite at roughly US$28,000 for the week. Four Seasons suggests budgeting about US$250 per person per day for food and beverage, which over seven days for two is approximately US$3,500. That is the company's own figure, not a critic's.

Now sanity-check it against the menu. Two dinners a day is not the pattern; one substantial dinner is. A rib-eye at US$80 and a fish of the day at US$60, with a bottle of wine and two cocktails at US$26 each, comfortably reaches US$250–300 for a couple in a single evening — before the omakase at US$195 a head, or a spa treatment at US$270, or the US$130 negroni that exists mainly to be noticed.

A realistic week for a couple who dine aboard most evenings, drink moderately, and take one spa treatment each therefore lands somewhere between US$3,500 and US$5,000 on top of the fare. Guests who eat ashore in most ports will land materially below that, which is precisely the behaviour the pricing model is designed to reward.

Budget the fare as roughly 85 per cent of the true cost, not 100 per cent, and the model stops feeling like a trap.

How it compares with the inclusive alternative

The fair comparison is not fare-to-fare. An inclusive ultra-luxury line at, say, US$32,000 for a comparable week has effectively pre-purchased that US$3,500–5,000 of consumption on your behalf, at a price set by them rather than by you.

If you would have consumed all of it, inclusive pricing is at worst neutral and psychologically superior. If you would have consumed half of it — because you are ashore for lunch and dinner in Portofino, Cephalonia and Hvar — you have paid for the other half and received nothing. That is the entire argument, and it turns on your own habits rather than on any defect in either model.

The space argument, examined

Where the product is unambiguously strong is volume per guest. A 679-foot hull carrying roughly 200 passengers is extraordinarily generous; the reviewer's remark that the ship could hold 500 is the most telling line in the coverage. The smallest suite at 473 square feet exceeds many hotel suites ashore, and the crew complement of 210 against 204 guests on a sold-out sailing is better than one-to-one.

That ratio is the thing that cannot be replicated by a competitor without building a comparable ship, and it is why the second vessel, due 2028, will carry fewer suites rather than more. Four Seasons has decided that space, not inclusion, is its differentiator — and on the evidence of the first season, the decision is coherent even where the execution is still maturing.