TEMPTING, as I held my invite for the launch party for the new ship Easy CruiseLife, to put on a T-Shirt saying Easy Guest. Stelios would probably have enjoyed the joke: he is famed for his sense of humour. But beneath the bonhomie is a brilliant businessman, Stelios Haji-Ioannou has grown from his first EasyJet, creating not just an Easy Life but a whole Easy World: EasyPizza, EasyCinema and disappointingly, as I misread, Easymen, not as one might hope a shop for hunks, but actually Easy4Men, a cosmetics chain.
Against the constant ebb and flow of ferries in Piraeus dock, the new ship looked sleek and elegant. Not coated in orange livery, as I had expected, but a discreet dark blue with a single ribbon of orange running its length. No red carpet but an orange one led past a dancing mermaid into the main cocktail bar.
Waiters circulated with champagne and cosmopolitans, mime artists mingled with the glamourous and glitzy, the band played, I expected Ginger and Fred to waltz down the stairs. We wandered across polished wood decks, past jacuzzis and spa treatment rooms and lounged in the warm night on chaises longues. There’s a retro glamour to the boat, and it’s a bold enterprise. It might be easy and cheap but it’s certainly not tacky. A floating hotel for five hundred, no meals at the Captain’s table and formality, itineraries to maximise time spent ashore. The ship always docks by lunch and sails in the small hours of the morning, allowing those who want to dance the night away on a Mykonos beach the time to do it and fall into their cabin by dawn. Then as one sleeps the ship quietly glides to its next location. It’s a brilliant concept.
But like all Stelios ventures, the no frills approach means you get what you pay for. If you want your cabin cleaned daily and linen changed, you pay extra; if you want cream on your pudding it will be more, but like the rather alarming frosted glass toilet doors that barely conceal the actions inside at least the costs are transparent.
As the band played its last tune, we reluctantly headed for the gang plank, it was easy to want to stay on board and head off into the night, to Turkey and Albania, new destinations being offered. But wherever this ship may sail, there is no doubt of its loyalty, for boldly written, just above the water line in large white letters are the words, for all to see – “Reunite the Parthenon Marbles”. One senses Stelios will always get the last laugh…
