Grupo Vidanta, the Mexican luxury resort operator, has entered the cruise business as the 216- guest Elegant has launched operations in the Mediterranean, where it will sail offering a luxury yacht-like product through the fall.

Ivan Chavez, executive vice president of Grupo Vidanta, told Cruise Industry News they approached the ship they bought as if it were a real estate parcel.

Vidanta bought an existing vessel, the 540-guest 1990-built Voyager from the demise of the All Leisure Group, in 2017.

“As developers, we saw it as a piece of land,” Chavez said. “When you have a great architect come in, the number one constraint is the size of your land: what can you do with that? That’s how we saw the size of an existing ship. We weren’t really looking at it as a ship.”

The framing mirrored past Vidanta moves, Chavez said, from its Cirque du Soleil dinner-show partnership to Jack Nicklaus’ shorter “executive” golf course format to a forthcoming luxury theme park designed to eliminate queues.

“We’re a 50-year-old company, but we feel like we’re a startup in many ways,” he said.

“We did look at newbuilds. Every shipyard that we met with, they said, ‘We have so many orders that it’s going to be seven to eight years before we can deliver something like what you need,’” he said.

“And not only that, they were trying to sell us replicas of other ships they were already building. They said, ‘Well, I’m already building X. I’ll give you an identical one — you’re going to save so much money on design fees.’ But we said we don’t want a cruise ship. We’re trying to do something very special.”

For the ship refit, Vidanta first added a stern superstructure for a restaurant, cut interior cabins and expanded outdoor deck space. In addition are multiple new restaurants.

The ship was then repositioned to Mexico so Vidanta’s in-house design team could learn the vessel firsthand and run test sailings with resort customers, which resulted in feedback that reshaped the accommodation plan.

“Our resorts on land are known for their huge spaces, and our rooms are very, very large,” Chavez said. “A lot of our customers had never been on a ship before, so they didn’t understand there’s a size trade-off between land and sea. Even though our cabins were larger than the cruise industry average, they were just comparing them to the room where they were sleeping the night before.”

Rather than educate the customer, Vidanta went bigger. Suites were combined from two, three, sometimes four of the original cabins, Chavez said.

Tillberg Design of Sweden was added to the project, along with longtime Vidanta collaborator Rockwell Group of New York.

Capacity was ultimately cut from more than 500 to 216.

Everything guest-facing is new, Chavez said: restaurants, bars, a casino, theater (the ship previously had only a lounge), sports viewing area, coffee bars, spa, fitness, marina lounge and a deployable marina platform.

The ship is not all-inclusive which is a deliberate carryover from how Vidanta has resisted the all-inclusive label on land, Chavez said.

“All-inclusive is not synonymous with luxury in our view,” he said. “What we really believe in is quality. To have quality, people have to earn the satisfaction of the customer. When a customer is paying for a meal or for a service onboard, if they receive quality, satisfaction will be there. If they’re not, anger will be there, and we have a chance to address it. That puts a lot of pressure on delivering quality.”

Itineraries were designed to exploit the ship’s scale. With 216 guests and two onboard tenders, the Elegant can call at yacht-centric ports such as Saint-Tropez, Monte Carlo and Cannes.

“We wanted to show the Mediterranean at night, not just during the day,” Chavez said. “The most beautiful moments in Europe happen around sundown, and we thought it would be such a shame for our guests to only experience sunsets on the way out of Europe on their way to the next destination.”

All itineraries include late departures, in some cases midnight or 1 a.m., with some calls extended to overnight or two-night stays. Ports were selected on experience first, then matched to logistics; Chavez said Vidanta secured 85 to 90 percent of its desired itineraries.

The ship will remain in Europe through the 2026-27 winter in a “warm layup” on a river in northern France, with the off-season dedicated to charters and special events.

“We have a lot of requests from the film industry, and a lot of requests for full family charters to take the entire ship,” Chavez said.

Vidanta’s resort business draws 75 percent of its guests from the U.S. and Canada and 25 percent from Mexico, Chavez said, and that North American base is filling the ship’s debut summer.

“They’re our most prized customers, and they’re the first ones to experience the ship. So we have to get it right,” he said. “If they’re there and having a great time, the word’s going to spread, and it’s already spreading.”

Vidanta ran two months of friends-and-family test sailings and deployed senior resort chefs, housekeeping staff and hotel managers onboard alongside seasoned cruise professionals, he said.

The Elegant is mostly adult-only, with approximately 20 cabins open to families on select summer sailings. Chavez said the ship is a starting point, not an endpoint.

“Our aim is not just to have one ship,” he said. “This is the size we wanted to start with, to understand and learn the industry. We want to grow to more ships, to be able to cater to families. The question is going to become: can we deliver a luxury product that’s not a cruise, in a manageable size for us, that is just as fun for kids and for everybody to get together? We’re not approaching anything with an expert mentality. We don’t believe that we know it all.”