When I visited the Oasis of the Seas the day before she was delivered to Royal Caribbean International at the STX Europe shipyard

in Turku, Finland, the first thing that surprised me -- aside from the jaw-dropping size -- was the bustling crowd of Royal crew members who already were working like a colony of ants on the ship.

They labored alongside shipyard workers who hammered, sawed and drilled to put the final touches on the $1.4 billion giant.

The ship, six years from conception to completion, didn't take any vacationers on its voyage across the Atlantic to its homeport of Port Everglades.

Yet many crew members had been working onboard for a month or longer. And it wasn't just the marine crew -- who, of course, had to prepare for the voyage across the North Atlantic to Port Everglades.

Docked at the massive shipyard on the Baltic Sea, Oasis was loaded with hotel concierges, waiters and chambermaids, as well as musicians, comedians, dancers, ice skaters, even an art dealer, working intensely in anticipation of the ship's debut and its first revenue sailing on Dec. 1.

A roomful of seamstresses were stitching brightly colored costumes. A piano tuner plunked away at a grand piano, while a cleaner painstakingly buffed a table top to a high gloss. The energy was palpable on ``I-95,'' the nickname for the main thoroughfare on a crew-only working deck, with each worker doing his own thing yet exuding a sense of something big going on.

The ``game-changing'' design of the 225,000 gross ton ship, by far the world's largest and most expensive, is capturing the public's imagination with its seven themed neighborhoods, a Central Park with 24-foot live trees, a zipline and an AquaTheater.

But the ship's success as a vacation spot will depend on the crew and entertainers who bring the fancy hardware to life.

Raimund H. Gschaider, Oasis's hotel director, told me 98 percent of the crew members came from other Royal ships, with a maximum of 8 percent tapped from a single vessel to avoid diluting another's talent pool. ``The only new positions are the new professions -- like a gardener. We didn't need a gardener before we had Central Park,'' said Gschaider, who has been working onboard the ship for months.

``The ship is a tool . . . a very good tool,'' said Richard D. Fain, Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd.'s chairman and chief executive. ``But the ship is not what makes this special: It's the people.''

Martha Brannigan covers cruise lines and banking for The Miami Herald.