Is Bigger Always Better?

Cruise ships keep getting bigger and bigger. The largest one yet, Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, pictured above, is currently on its maiden voyage, having left Miami on Saturday. 

Icon of the Seas is enormous by any measure. The boat is nearly 1200 feet long–that’s four football fields, to give you a sense of scale–has 20 decks, and carries at capacity 7,600 passengers and 2,350 crew members. But those numbers, though impressive, are just scratching the surface: the ship has more than 40 restaurants, bars, and lounges, seven swimming pools, six water slides, an ice skating rink, and even a park, complete with trees and other live plants, in case you need a little pastoral tranquility during your voyage. One of the pools is the largest swimming pool aboard any ship, and another is the first suspended infinity pool on a cruise liner.

The Icon is so immense that it is divided into eight “neighborhoods,” to help people get their bearings. The pools are found in one neighborhood, and the rides and slides are in another. One of the neighborhoods, called The Grove, is reserved for high-roller passengers who have booked suites. It’s at the opposite end of the ship from the slides ‘hood, and has its own pool terrace, spa pool, and restaurants, so the bigwigs don’t have to rub elbows with the slide-riding masses unless they really want to do so.

I’m sure there are a lot of people who would be attracted to a trip on a floating pleasure palace like the Icon of the Seas. Cruise ship commercials always seem to show people careening down a water slide, so that option must appeal to somebody. Not me, however.

I’m not a big fan of cruises, generally, but in any event I would never want to be on a boat with thousands of other people. I can’t imagine the crush of humanity during the boarding and off-boarding processes. And it seems like the traditional model for a cruise–a calm, stress-free vacation with lots of time for reading, walking the decks, eating leisurely meals, and sunning and snoozing on lounge chairs–has been displaced by a more frenetic model that tries to cram every conceivable activity option onto gigantic vessels.

So, is bigger necessarily better? Cruise lines sure seem to think so.