The world’s biggest cruise ship
Do you think bigger is better? Well, step this way. The Symphony of the Seas is Royal Caribbean’s latest launch — and it’s a whopper. How big exactly? At 1,188 ft long, it’s around the same length as 15 tennis courts. That’s longer than The Shard is tall. When it’s full, it’ll be able to carry 6,680 guests, thanks to the 2,759 ‘staterooms’ (cabins to you and me), more suites and 2,200 staff.
The ship is so vast, it took 4,700 shipbuilders three years to finish and cost around €1 billion.
All of which means . . . it’s not, in fact, that much bigger than the last biggest cruise ship ever built. Still, it’s the biggest for now, and that means there are so many restaurants — Japanese, Italian, Mexican street food, New England seafood and so on — that you don’t need to eat at the same one twice in a week.
It also means you may not even find the same restaurant twice. To help the directionally challenged, the layout is divided into neighbourhoods. There are seven boroughs (that’s two more than teeny tiny New york) and the Central Park area has more plants than there are Great Pavilion exhibits at the minuscule Chelsea Flower Show, plus trees reaching skyward, which seem unreal.
Symphony has also gone big (what else?) on enormous, swirly-curly covered slides. They seem to be its signature for deck-side shenanigans and they’re everywhere: waterslides and the deep purple ultimate Abyss, which is, guess what, the tallest slide at sea, swooshing you ten floors down while you sit on a magic carpet/sack creation, screaming.
There’s also a bright orange slide in the enormous family suite, which briskly delivers you from the bedrooms into the sitting room.
I’m in a roomy cabin with a balcony that overlooks the sea. My only gripe is that it’s blandly decorated in shades of greigeybrown and teal and feels a little bit un-fabulous.
BUT it doesn’t dim the profound pleasure of going to sleep with the balcony door open and the rhythmic sound of the sea carrying up to the 14th deck. Less tranquil are the Battle for Planet Z, which is a glow-in-thedark laser tag game, and all manner of derring-do activities, such as zip-lining and rock climbing. There’s also yoga, cupcake decorating classes, foot print analysis, gaming lessons in the casino and a sports bar with 30 screens. There are also countless pools. Evenings can be taken up with the musical Hairspray or an ice show, but I choose AquaNation, in which men and women perform thrilling aquabatics and dive off olympic-height boards into quite a tiny (I know!) pool.
I like the playful touches. There’s the Rising Tide Bar, which glides up and down between three decks, and a robotic bar, where a bionic arm will make you a cocktail.
The exceptional staff are an international crew. At breakfast, one of the guests notices on a waiter’s badge that he is from Mauritius. The waiter is so bowled over to discover the guest is a regular visitor to his home country that, as I leave, they are swapping addresses. Symphony is spending this summer cruising the Mediterranean. As Sir Francis Drake noted: ‘It isn’t that life ashore is distasteful to me. But life at sea is better.’ And he never even tried the surfing simulator.