Can you imagine bobbing around at sea with 6079 other guests and 2200 crew members? That's exactly how I spent my last week and it BLEW MY MIND. Every time I thought something wasn't possible at sea, it happened. You've got to see it to believe it.
Fancy a more luxurious, adult kind of cruise? I recently cruised on a BILLION dollar luxury cruise ship: https://youtu.be/TrjqMwWanEA Considering a family-focused alternative, check out my review of the Norwegian Prima here: https://youtu.be/qN4WPbpo6YI Prefer a British cruise line, I spent a week cruising with Fred Olsen here: https://youtu.be/10oaJ10kdAo
I’ve just disembarked a cruise on one of the biggest cruise ships in the world that can hold well over 8000 people. The ship I was sailing on was Symphony of the Seas, she cost 1.3 billion dollars to build and is as long as 16 tennis courts.
I’ve been cruising since I was a child but this ship blew my mind in every single way possible, I saw and did things that I never knew could happen at sea. Even with all the time in the world, I couldn’t have dreamt up the things that happened on this ship.
Something about the megaships has always interested me. I was already a fan of cruising so I hoped that a really big ship would just be everything that I loved but on a grander scale. That said, I was worried that the ship would feel overwhelming and I didn’t know if it would be so busy that it’d be impossible to do the things that I wanted to do. Royal Caribbean are very much a family cruise line too so I knew there would be thousands of children onboard. Literally.
When I was that the ship was sailing from Barcelona which isn’t too far from my home in England I decided that this would be my chance to give it a go. The cruise wasn’t cheap but I hoped that I’d get what I paid for.
We boarded in Barcelona and set sail for a 7-night cruise cruising the Mediterranean. I’d heard about the ship having an ice skating rink, a zip line, waterslides, theatres and even a park in the middle before I boarded but nothing could have prepared me for when the bus pulled up alongside the ship. For context, Symphony of the Seas is the same high as 18 buses standing on top of each other, and 30 buses stood in a line.
Embarkation was very fast and easy. Royal Caribbean are keen on their technology so they have an app where I’d already uploaded my security photo and attached my credit card before I got to the ship. All they had to do in the terminal was scan the QR code in the app and match it to my passport. From the door to the ship took a maximum of 10 minutes which I didn’t expect. You’d think that as over 6000 people were boarding the ship that it would take ages but I’ve been on ships that had less than a sixth of the passengers where embarkation took 2 or 3 hours. This was a great sign and it did put my mind at ease a little bit about the number of people on the ship.
We were boarding later than planned as our original flight was changed and then delayed but the positive of that was that our cabin was already ready when we boarded the ship. After a quick stop off at our muster drill we found our room up on deck 11 and I got my first look at what Royal Caribbean call a neighbourhood. The neighbourhood that my cabin looked over was called the boardwalk and I was blown away by this space. The two slides looked amazing and beyond that was an area called the aqua theatre. I was so excited to get to see a show here later in the cruise, I’d heard about people flying through the air and diving, I couldn’t quite believe things like that could happen on a cruise ship but that really was the theme of this cruise. I couldn’t believe something was possible and time and time again this ship surprised me.
It was a little after 2pm that we boarded the ship and having started our journey at 5am we were very hungry.
Cruise ships are all about the food so we headed up to the buffet on deck 16. It turned out that the buffet had closed at 2 which was a shame but I’m still glad we went up because it gave us our first look at the Central Park. When you hear that a cruise ship has a park you might be thinking a room with a few plants, but my goodness this area looked cooler than any park I know on land.
