CITIES ON THE SEA
Cruise ships are betting on big, but not everyone is on board
BARCELONA – Intimate it is not. Eighteen decks high and 1,188 feet long, Royal Caribbean’s Symphony of the Seas, which makes its maiden voyage Saturday, has room for 6,680 passengers at full capacity. Add a crew of 2,200 and on busy weeks you could find nearly 9,000 people on board.
Like the megaresorts of Las Vegas or Orlando, today’s cruise ships have become destinations unto themselves, with more attractions, shows, restaurants and nightspots than you could possibly experience in a typical weeklong getaway.
The enormous choice of activities on the new crop of megaships — decktop water parks to Broadway shows — also is key to the allure.
“We had eight sea days, and we never ran short of things to do,” says Jessalynn Strauss, 41, of Elon, N.C., a college professor and part-time travel blogger who completed her first sailing on one of Royal Caribbean’s biggest ships. “It was almost like we’d moved to a new city.”
Royal Caribbean isn’t alone in going big in recent years. Rivals MSC Cruises, Norwegian Cruise Line and Carnival Cruise Line have been rolling out their biggest ships ever, too.
Symphony’s outdoor decks feature three pool zones, a trio of waterslides, two surf simulators, a miniature golf course, rock climbing walls and more. Inside there are nearly two dozen restaurants and snack outlets (everything from a Jamie Oliver eatery to a Starbucks), multiple bars, a comedy
club, a jazz club, a 1,401-seat theater that houses a full production of Broadway’s Hairspray and even an ice rink.
Symphony also boasts 2,759 cabins — the most ever on a cruise ship. Broken up into more than 30 categories, they include everything from lowpriced windowless “interior” rooms that measure just 149 square feet to a super-high-priced two-deck-high suite more than 10 times that size.
Measuring 228,081 gross register tons, Symphony is a slightly bigger version of the current size leader in the cruise world, Harmony of the Seas, and two slightly smaller sister vessels that all have been huge hits. Harmony and its sisters routinely score near the top of guest-satisfaction surveys. Demand for the ships is through the roof.
But not everyone is on board with the Bigger is Better strategy.
One of the fastest-growing cruise lines in recent years, Viking, has taken an opposite tack, building smaller vessels designed to offer a more intimate, upscale and destination-focused experience.
“The big guys advertise that the ship is the destination,” Viking chairman and founder Torstein Hagen noted this month at a christening for Viking’s fourth ocean ship — a 930passenger vessel that is one-fifth the size of Symphony. “We say no, it’s the destination that is the destination.”
The cruise world also is seeing rapid expansion by lines that operate “expedition style” vessels that hold just 100 to 200 passengers. Carrying motorized rafts for landings, they’re designed to explore the most off-the-beaten-path destinations from the Arctic to Papua New Guinea.
Royal Caribbean International President and CEO Michael Bayley says there’s something about the energy created on a giant vessel with thousands of people looking for fun that
“We had eight sea days, and we never ran short of things to do. It was almost like we’d moved to a new city.” Jessalynn Strauss, 41
makes them irresistible.
In short, even as cruise ships are getting bigger, they’re also getting smaller. And that’s just fine, says Bayley, who started 37 years ago as an assistant purser on the Nordic Prince — a ship one-twelfth the size of Symphony: “There is a lot of diversity in what people are looking for.”