Royal Caribbean’s new ship will be a record-breaker

A new cruise ship from Royal Caribbean coming in 2018 will be the biggest ever built.

Royal Caribbean said this week the fourth vessel in its record-breaking Oasis class series, scheduled to debut in April 2018, will measure about 209,000 tonnes, eclipsing the current size leader by about 2,700 tonnes.

Royal Caribbean also announced the name for the ship, which is under construction at a shipyard in France: Symphony of the Seas.

The line said the vessel will sail to the Caribbean from Miami starting in November 2018. It will move to the Florida city after spending its first few months operating voyages in the Mediterranean.

“It’s slightly longer and it’s a tad wider” than earlier Oasis class ships, Royal Caribbean CEO Michael Bayley said of Symphony during a conference call with cruise writers.

He promised a vessel with attractions both familiar and new that was “packed full of adventure.”

“It will boast all of the innovations that are so well known with the Oasis class, and then of course, because we have to have a whole new set of features — there are additions that we are not going to talk about today.”

The new details about the ship came as Royal Caribbean prepared to break ground Wednesday on a new terminal at the port of Miami that will be able to accommodate ships as big as Symphony.

In addition to Symphony, the new terminal will be home to a second Oasis class ship, Allure of the Seas, which will move to Miami from its current home in Fort Lauderdale in late 2018, Royal Caribbean said.

In becoming the world’s largest cruise ship, Symphony will be dethroning the third vessel in the Oasis Class series, Harmony of the Seas. Unveiled just eight months ago, Harmony measures about 206,000 tons and can carry up to 6,780 passengers.

Symphony will share many of the same features as Harmony, which is about 1,500 tonnes larger than the first two Oasis class ships, Oasis of the Seas and Allure, and offers attractions that aren’t on the earlier vessels. Among features that were new on Harmony that will be debuting on Symphony, too is Ultimate Abyss, heralded as the most thrilling attraction ever conceived for a cruise ship. Comprised of two swirling slides, Ultimate Abyss drops nine stories from near the top of the vessel down to one of its lowest decks.

Symphony will also have a multi-deck water slide area, which Royal Caribbean began adding to ships in 2016, and a Bionic Bar where drinks are served by robot bartenders, a concept that debuted in 2014 on Royal Caribbean’s Quantum of the Seas.

While remaining mostly mum on new and updated features planned for Symphony, Bayley said the vessel’s forward-facing solarium area would be “quite a lot” different than the ones on the earlier Oasis class ships. In addition, Symphony will have 28 more cabins than Harmony.

All three of the Oasis class ships currently at sea are in excess of 204,000 tons — more than 30 per cent larger than the next largest cruise ships.

With the arrival of Symphony, Royal Caribbean will have 26 ships.