for the whole ship and can't get out of it. You've bought the ship for that week. It's $2,000,000 to $4,000,000 just to charter the ship with Royal Caribbean (depending on the ship). If you fill up the ship, you can make bank. Add to that all the costs of putting all those people on the ship. The fixed costs are high.

I'm in this industry and we've considered chartering a ship before (and we may do it at some point with a much smaller ship); but the risk is big.

I was surprised when I saw that BYU was willing to put their name on something this risky. Unless you've done it before, it's a gamble. In my opinion, they should have started with a much smaller ship to test the waters.

I know of an LDS travel company that did this and lost everything, which ultimately ended up with them ripping off thousands of clients.