Four Seasons I sailed from Athens on 5 April 2026, bound for Istanbul by way of Spetses, Folegandros, Santorini and Agios Nikólaos on Crete — 7 nights, and the first Greek Isles voyage of the first vessel Four Seasons has put to sea. She had been handed over at Ancona on 25 February and had made her maiden departure on 20 March. The Aegean is where her first season settled.

Ancona to the Aegean

Fincantieri delivered Four Seasons I at its Ancona shipyard on 25 February 2026 to Marc-Henry Cruise Holdings, joint owner and operator of Four Seasons Yachts. She measures 207 metres and 34,000 gross tons, and she is the first vessel completed under the yard’s Navis Sapiens programme — an integrated digital architecture that puts artificial intelligence and real-time data into the running of the ship rather than into the guest’s line of sight. Her maiden voyage followed on 20 March 2026, and by the first week of April she was in Greek water.

Aboard

95 suites, and not one of them interior. Every suite faces the sea and holds outdoor ground of its own. The largest, the Funnel Suite, runs to 922 square metres across four levels behind floor-to-ceiling windows, housed within the vessel’s glass-enclosed funnel; the Loft Suite to 739 square metres, of which 408 are terrace. Four Seasons puts the ratio of guests to staff at 1 to 1.

The overall design is Tillberg Design of Sweden’s, the social spaces are Martin Brudnizki Design Studio’s, and the creative direction is Prosper Assouline’s. There are 11 restaurants and lounges. L’Oceana Spa holds a hammam, a thermal circuit, cryotherapy and infrared therapy. A transverse marina opens at sea level across both sides of the hull — which is what the itineraries mean by a marina day, set off Folegandros on the outbound voyage and off Rineia on the return.

The Athens shuttle

The Greek season was built as a pair of 7-night voyages pivoting on Athens. Greek Isles featuring Santorini & Yalikavak embarked at Athens and disembarked at Istanbul, calling at Spetses, a marina day off Folegandros, Santorini, Agios Nikólaos on Crete, then Yalikavak, Bodrum and Çeşme. Greek Isles featuring Mykonos & Hydra ran the other way — Istanbul to Athens, by way of Göcek, Didim, Symi, a marina day off Rineia, Mykonos and Hydra. Between them they accounted for 8 sailings, leaving on the Sundays of 5, 12, 19 and 26 April and 3, 10, 17 and 24 May 2026.

The timing is a decision, not a default. The Greek and Turkish voyages fell in April and May, ahead of the summer season — quieter harbours, villages that have not yet turned to face the crowd, and an Aegean still cool enough to walk in at noon. A yacht of 95 suites is small enough to keep that proposition intact; the same fortnight in August would not.

An Athenian kitchen at sea

Of the 8 sailings, 2 carried a chef from the city they turned around in. Luca Piscazzi, of Pelagos at Four Seasons Astir Palace Hotel Athens, sailed as chef-in-residence on the Mykonos and Hydra voyage of 26 April to 3 May 2026 and the Santorini and Yalikavak voyage of 3 to 10 May, cooking at Sedna, the yacht’s centrepiece dining room, alongside her executive chef Armando Ferman Toledo and chef de cuisine Gerardo Acunzo. It is a short distance between a kitchen ashore and a table at sea — the same hands, carried out past the Saronic islands rather than reproduced at a remove.

What it changes for Athens

Athens has long been a place travellers pass through on the way to the islands. A turnaround port is a different proposition: the city becomes the hinge of the journey rather than its airport, worth the nights before boarding and the nights after stepping off. A programme of 8 sailings across two months is modest by the standards of the industry, and that is the point — 95 suites, filled twice a month, is a scale the Cyclades can absorb without noticing.

A second vessel is scheduled for delivery in 2027. What the first has established, in the two months she gave the Aegean, is that a hotel company can put a house on the water and have it read as a yacht rather than a ship — and that the water it chose to prove it on was Greek.

The house makes the introduction, for those who ask.