Will the World's Largest Cruise Ship Sink or Swim?

Oasis of the Seas" rel="lightbox" class="lightbox">ENLARGE PHOTO+

Royal Caribbean's Oasis of the Seas

Photograph for TIME by Andrew Kaufman

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For an industry rife with superstitions--it's bad luck to rename ships, step aboard with your left foot, sight a redhead before you sail--Friday the 13th would seem an unlikely day for Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd.'s (RCL) newest vessel, Oasis of the Seas, to make her debut arrival in Port Everglades, Fla. Yet there she was, delayed two days by the stormy Atlantic on the way over from a shipyard in Finland, her 16 decks dwarfing the passing Miami skyline. The $1.4 billion megaship--the largest passenger ship ever made, with room for 6,296 guests--is nearly half again as big as the last biggest cruise ship, RCL's Freedom of the Seas. She's as big as a supertanker or a container ship. Flatten the deck and you could launch F-18s off it. If you were sitting on the 20th floor of a high-rise next to the ship, you'd be able to talk to the sunbathers beside one of the pools.

The buzz has been just as big, says CruiseCritic.com's editor Carolyn Spencer Brown. "I've been covering the industry for 14 years, and I've never seen people so excited about it. And these aren't ship geeks."

Filling a ship that humongous in the middle of an economic storm will take a lot more than ship geeks too. Across the industry, the number of passengers isn't down, but sales and revenues are hurting because of discounts as deep as the blue seas. RCL's third-quarter net income fell to $230 million, compared with last year's $411 million--while sales were $1.8 billion, a 14% decrease. "Average pricing is less than normal," says Royal Caribbean International's CEO, Adam Goldstein, "but we're hopeful that we'll recover pricing as quickly as possible." That's important because a cruise-ship company owns its properties, unlike hotel companies that manage resorts, so RCL bears all the ships' finance and carrying costs.

Oasis is a giant leisure machine, with more spas, pools, bars and activities than you could probably hit in a week. Royal Caribbean calls itself the Nation of Why Not--"as in, Why not try rock climbing?" says Goldstein. "You don't have to try surfing on the Flowrider, but it's there." You can get certified for scuba diving, take an ice-skating lesson, ride a zip line, play basketball, spar in a boxing ring, have a massage or see a version of the Broadway show Hairspray. "They're thinking outside the box," says JoAnne Kochneff, owner of Travel by Gagnon, an independent agency in Grand Rapids, Mich., who has been on 60 cruises. "For someone who thinks cruising is eating yourself sick at the buffet, sitting in a smoky casino or lounging by the pool, this ship will change their mind."

To build the world's biggest cruise ship RCL also had to build the world's widest one, at 208 ft., and that change in naval architecture allowed the company to rethink what a cruise ship could be. The upper decks have been split open in the middle of the ship to create a light-filled atrium with 12,000 plants tended by a full-time horticulturist. The open space, which the company calls Central Park, helps eliminate one of the worries that have caused travelers to shun ships--the fear of feeling cooped up. "One of the ironies of cruising is that you're out on the open seas," says Brown, "yet spend all your time indoors."