| Launched | 1998 |
|---|---|
| Operator | Elixir Cruises |
| Status | Active |
| All names | Elysium; Celebrity Xperience; Eclipse |
Overview
Elysium is the smallest and most travelled ship in this batch: a roughly 50-passenger expedition yacht that began as the Galápagos vessel Eclipse, became Celebrity Xperience when Celebrity Cruises bought her operator, and was reborn in 2021 as the founding ship of Greece's Elixir Cruises, sailing the Greek islands as a boutique wellness yacht. The dataset row is one of the sparsest in the roster — no IMO, no tonnage, no dimensions, no builder — and this guide is correspondingly careful: it tells the documented story of the ship without inventing the specifications the dataset does not supply.
What is documented is a coherent and interesting career. A vessel built in 1998 for Galápagos cruising with Ocean Adventures — the dataset's launch year matches CruiseMapper's "1998-built" description — was good enough to be absorbed into a major group's expedition fleet, and then, when that group rationalised its Galápagos operation around the purpose-built Celebrity Flora, good enough again to launch a new Greek cruise line. Small ships live by being wanted; this one has been wanted by three successive owners on two oceans.
Key specifications
The dataset supplies only a launch year, 1998, a status of active, an operator (Elixir Cruises) and a chain of names. It gives no IMO number, tonnage, dimensions, capacity, crew or speed, and none are presented in the spec box, in line with this directory's rule that blank fields are omitted rather than filled from memory.
Secondary sources describe a 48- to 50-passenger vessel — Cruise Industry News and Travel Weekly both describe the Elixir ship as a 50-passenger yacht, and the Galápagos-era Eclipse was marketed at 48 guests — with about 25 cabins, indoor and outdoor dining areas, a library, two bars and a sun deck with a Jacuzzi. She should be understood at the scale those figures imply: a large yacht, not a small liner — two orders of magnitude below the megaships elsewhere in this directory.
Design and construction
The ship was built for Galápagos service, and her design is an expedition yacht's: shallow, manoeuvrable, and organised around going ashore — observation and sun decks for wildlife watching, indoor and al fresco dining, a library and lounge for naturalist briefings, and an infirmary with a doctor carried in her Celebrity configuration. Her conversion for the Galápagos under Ocean Adventures, described in period marketing as purpose-adapted for upscale travellers who wanted a larger vessel's amenities at yacht scale, set the pattern her later owners inherited.
No builder, yard or hull number is recorded in the dataset, and none is asserted here. That absence is itself information: ships of this size, built for the South American expedition market, are far less completely documented than European-built cruise ships, and the honest directory entry says so.
Naming, launch and maiden voyage
The name chain in the dataset reads, in the order given: Elysium; Emerald Dream; Xperience; Celebrity Xperience; Eclipse. Read chronologically — as the ship's documented history requires — it runs the other way: she was Eclipse in her Galápagos years with Ocean Adventures, became Celebrity Xperience on joining Celebrity in March 2017, and became Elysium on her sale to Elixir. The intermediate names Emerald Dream and Xperience in the dataset appear to be fragments of that chain — Xperience is the short form of her Celebrity name — and Emerald Dream is not corroborated in the sources used for this guide.
Elysium — the Elysian Fields, paradise of Greek myth — is a considered name for a Greek boutique line's Greek-island ship, and it was under that name that she began Elixir service in summer 2021, with first sailings reported from late June 2021.
Career by operator
Her Galápagos career with Ocean Adventures ended with Celebrity's purchase of that operator, announced in 2016; after a January 2017 drydock refresh she sailed as Celebrity Xperience in Celebrity's Galápagos fleet alongside Celebrity Xpedition and Celebrity Xploration. Celebrity withdrew her as the purpose-built Celebrity Flora entered service in 2019, and in November 2020 she was bought by Ioannis Termidos (also rendered Terdimos) for the new Elixir Cruises, entering Greek service in 2021 after a complete refurbishment.
| Name | Operator | Period |
|---|---|---|
| Eclipse | Ocean Adventures (Galápagos) | Until 2016 |
| Celebrity Xperience | Celebrity Cruises | 2017–2019 |
| Elysium | Elixir Cruises | 2021–present |
Onboard character
In both her lives the character is intimacy plus interpretation. As a Galápagos ship she carried naturalist guides, ran small-group shore excursions, and centred shipboard life on the observation deck, the library and the dining room — the expedition pattern. Elixir kept the scale and changed the emphasis to wellness: a spa and gym, a sun-deck lounge with hot tub and telescope, resident yoga, meditation and wellness coaches, and water-sports equipment from snorkelling gear to paddleboards, with meals on a half-board pattern that leaves evenings free in port.
Twenty-five cabins in soft blues and cream, a crew-to-guest ratio no large ship can approach, and anchorages chosen for sunset views rather than berth availability complete a product that reviewers have consistently described as a private yacht with a programme attached — which is precisely what her founder said he intended.
Major refits and incidents
Two conversions define her: the January 2017 drydock that brought her from Ocean Adventures standard to Celebrity's, and the thorough 2020–21 refurbishment for Elixir that trade reports describe as complete, preparing her for the Greek launch season of 2021. No casualty, grounding, fire or other major incident appears in the documented record of any of her three careers.
Sister ships and class
She has no class and no sister in the cruise-ship sense. In Celebrity service she was grouped commercially with the Galápagos fleet — the 100-passenger Celebrity Xpedition and the 16-passenger catamaran Celebrity Xploration — three unrelated hulls marketed as one expedition product. At Elixir she is, to date, the line's founding and only ship of her story.
Fate and where she is now
Elysium is in active service with Elixir Cruises, as the dataset records — a Galápagos expedition yacht that crossed an ocean, changed industries from nature expedition to wellness boutique, and found in the Aegean the second career that the dataset's bare name-chain only hints at. Her sparse dataset row is flagged in the batch notes: the ship deserves, and the sources support, a fuller specification record than the roster currently holds.
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cruise_ships; https://cruiseindustrynews.com/cruise-news/2021/05/elixir-cruises-on-a-mission-to-show-guests-santorini-sunsets/; https://www.cruisemapper.com/ships/Elixir-Elysium-yacht-1338?tab=itinerary