29 October 2009

Royal Caribbean welcomes Oasis of the Seas to fleet

Royal Caribbean took delivery of its 16-deck, 5,400-capacity cruise liner Oasis of the Seas today - complete with a park-at-sea, zipline, handcrafted carousel and multilevel urban-style loft suites.

The super ship has seven themed areas to suit the leisure interests of guests and an aquatic amphitheatre that is a pool by day and a theatre by night. The ship is the largest cruise ship on the seas, weighing in at 220,000 tons and offering 2,700 staterooms.

The ship will sail from Turku in Finland on Friday for its home port of Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where it will make its debut on November 11.

In keeping with the social media mania of the age, the ship’s progress will be fed onto daily webisodes broadcast on oasisoftheseas.com and via Twitter. Visitors to oasisoftheseas.com can view a Google Maps applications and follow the ship’s passage. Fans can also follow two blogs about the ship from chairman Richard Fain and President and CEO Adam Goldstein.

Royal Caribbean has innovated hugely within the sector in the last five years, introducing the formerly sedate world of cruise to the onboard FlowRider surf simulator, rock climbing walls, ice-skating rinks and cantilevered whirlpools.

Dinah Hatch