Genuine innovation buried in hype about Royal Caribbean's Oasis
Posted on Thu, Jul. 17, 2008
BY SPUD HILTON
San Francisco Chronicle
It's hardly a revelation, but new features on ships are rarely as earth-shaking (or water-churning) or revolutionary as cruise lines make them out to be. And, often, when they do live up to the billing, you know it's going to cost extra.
Flat-screen TVs in every room. Yawn.
A celebrity chef's name on the menus. Ho-hum.
Yet another specialty restaurant -- for $20 more. Sigh.
That said, Royal Caribbean is building a ship that, even when you eliminate the superlatives of biggest and tallest, is noteworthy -- even among cruisers who believe they've seen it all -- although not necessarily for the reasons Royal Caribbean thinks.
When it launches in December 2009, Oasis of the Seas will be larger than any other passenger vessel on the planet: 220,000 gross registered tons and room for 5,400 passengers. (By comparison, 220,000 tons is about the same as the tonnage for the Queen Mary 2 and the Queen Elizabeth 2 combined.) But what good is bigger if you don't do something with the space? When the QM2 was launched in 2004 as the biggest ship, there were large areas that didn't serve a purpose and seemed empty.
This ship, however, will be on the other end of the spectrum, for good or bad: filled to the walls with distractions, diversions and a whole new set of seemingly land-based ''wow'' features from the same folks who equipped previous ships with boxing rings, skating rinks and surfing machines.
Oasis will be the most ''terrapomorphized'' vessel to date (a word I made up for ``made to resemble land''). In short, it will be the ultimate houseboat.
Passengers will stroll up a building-lined street, through neighborhoods and past park-like gardens, according to company statements and artist renderings. There will be a water-show amphitheater and (wait for it) a zip-line. Just like on land, only with better drink service.
But the big innovation here isn't in the much-publicized ''wow!'' features (which we'll get to in a moment). What's new and, well, water-churning, is a ship shape that allows more passengers to connect with the outside. Designers took the interior Royal Promenade from earlier ships -- a narrow, four-story corridor down the middle of the ship that is longer than a football field and creates the atmosphere of a city street -- and took off the roof.
Oasis will have what can only be described as a 62-foot-wide slot canyon running 328 feet up the middle of the ship, with a main street and gardens at the bottom and high walls made of the inward-facing windows and balconies of more than 300 cabins. Unlike the inward-facing cabins on the old Royal Promenade, these will have sunlight and sea breeze and -- because the slot canyon will continue out the stern of the ship -- some small slice of an ocean view.
Royal Caribbean, which is revealing details of the ship in phases, is calling the slot canyon Central Park, and is organizing portions of it into themed ''neighborhoods.'' (The Boardwalk neighborhood, for instance, will be a Coney Island-like stretch complete with hot dog stand and carousel.) There will still be a covered Royal Promenade underneath the slot canyon of Central Park, but it will be twice as wide, two-tiered and have some natural light.
As with any new class of Royal Caribbean ship, there has to be the requisite new ''wow'' features that appeal to the attention-deficit public -- and that make executives at a few other lines take a bullwhip to the company's engineers, screaming ``Why didn't you think of that?''
Here are a few of the notable features on Oasis, and no, I'm not making this up:
• Rising Tide, a bar that will rise and drop three stories like a slow elevator -- albeit a really big elevator that serves cosmos and mai tais -- between the Royal Promenade and Central Park.
• The aforementioned zip-line will be suspended across the canyon, nine decks above the Boardwalk area, about 100 feet up.
• Contemporary two-story urban loft suites that clearly separate the living space and the loft sleeping area, although both share the two-story floor-to-ceiling windows.
• AquaTheater, an amphitheater at the stern of the ship with the largest freshwater pool at sea. At night, the pool will feature ``heart-pounding theatrical performances of dramatic acrobatics, synchronized swimming, water ballet, and professional high-diving, as well as elaborate fountain shows synchronized to music and lights.''
Not everything in the plans is particularly new.
Royal Caribbean has been spending a lot of time and money drawing attention to the ship's themed neighborhoods (it has yet to reveal the full list), but other than covering bigger areas, the concept isn't revolutionary.
The new slotted shape, however, is probably the biggest change to passenger-ship design in the modern era of cruising. (The shape also is noteworthy if only because the company took space that typically would have had hundreds more cabins and turned it into empty sky -- a rare instance of forgoing revenue to do something different.)
With the new design will be new issues: Will the funnel exhaust waft into Central Park? Are we going to pay extra for each new feature? Will passengers with inward-facing cabins have any privacy on their balconies? Will a ship with 5,700 people be plagued with waiting in lines that rival those of Soviet-era bakeries?
I'm guessing that before the maiden voyage is over, the online communities boards at CruiseMates and CruiseCritic will be lit up with opinions on what works and what doesn't. The bigger the ship, the bigger the target and, yes, the more that can go wrong. We'll see.
Oasis will sail Caribbean itineraries out of Fort Lauderdale. For more, visit www.oasisoftheseas.com.
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