If I had to settle on one word to describe the world's largest cruise ship, it would be this:
Crickets.
Or perhaps "intimate."
You might think that's ridiculous. There are 6,000 souls on the Allure of the Seas, plus crew, a mere 2,400 more. The ship is so enormous the lifeboats seem like 1:1 replicas of the Titanic. It has an ice-skating rink and a zip line that drops nine decks. It has a shopping mall with a Coach store. It has three swimming pools and a water park. When the Allure and its two sister ships were launched, they probably displaced enough water to make the oceans rise 3 millimeters.
These Royal Caribbean vessels are enormous, and hence easy targets for those who hate the idea that people are taking cruises and enjoying them. Sorry, killjoys: They're great fun.
Consider the public areas in the average large cruise ship. There's the lido deck, with pools, bars and buffets. This is where you spend most of your time sunning and ingesting a variety of liquids and solids. There's the promenade deck, where you run off dessert or sit on a deck chair and watch people run while you have another dessert. There's an upper deck with tennis courts and with lounge chairs that overlook the acres of basting vacationers below. There's a lower deck with the restaurants and shops, the place with the deserted nightclub where a lonely guy from the Philippines spins dance music to an empty room.
Not the Allure.
This 1,187-foot-long giant does not have a stack of decks with predictable functions. It has neighborhoods.
The ship is hollow in the middle, with 10-story atriums fore and aft. At the back of the ship there's an entertainment district, with restaurants, a wave pool, a rock-climbing wall, a carousel for the kids! Hot dogs and doughnuts. It's meant to be an old East Coast boardwalk, and of course it's utterly ersatz; inauthenticity is a crucial part of the authentic cruise experience.
It's like a Disney park. Kids love it, some adults love it, other adults are amused by it, and even the haters have to be impressed by the sheer scale of it all. It's amazing that this floats and astonishing that it moves.
