What's the World's Largest Cruise Ship?
Royal International Caribbean’s Allure of the Seas nabs the top spot for the largest cruise ship in the world – perhaps it should be called Whale of the Seas instead! The ships beats out her sister Oasis of the Seas by just two inches, making Allure technically the world’s biggest cruise ship, even though the two have the same technical specifications and were constructed at the same time. Allure is just over 1,187 feet long (360 m). That’s nearly four football fields.
Builders in the shipyard say that it’s not uncommon to come up with small differences in ships so big — differences in length may occur simply due to the temperature of the steel in a ship as big as this.
The $1.5 billion-to-launch Allure lives in Florida, after two years of construction in Finland. The Allure weighs 225,282 gross tonnes and her displacement — the actual weight of the ship — is around 100,000 metric tons, slightly less than that of an American Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. Her steel hull alone weighs roughly 54,000 tons. [How Giant Ships Float]
Onboard the nearly-quarter-mile-long ship, 6,296 guests have an endless supply of entertainment and an amazing array of facilities, including:
- 16 passenger decks and 28 multi-level urban-style loft suites
- A two-deck dance hall and a theater with 1,380 seats
- The world’s first aquatic amphitheater serving as a pool by day and ocean-front theater by night
- A zip-line that diagonally spans nine decks above an open-air atrium
- An ice skating rink
To make the boarding and de-boarding process easier, Royal Caribbean opened a new 5.5-acre, 240,000-square-foot terminal in Fort Lauderdale, in 2009 to make sure that the thousands of passengers moving on and off the Oasis and the Allure would be able to go from curb to stateroom in 15 minutes. The ship mainly takes passengers to the Caribbean and back.
