Is Oasis of the Seas a White Elephant

Following the recent drop in Royal Caribbean International’s profits for the last quarter, American media is asking whether the company’s latest and greatest ship, Oasis of the Seas, is going to turn out to be a costly problem.

She’s the biggest cruise ship in existence, 20 stories tall, with space for 6,300 cruise passengers and 2,000 crew. That means 2,700 staterooms to fill, and the cost of creating such a juggernaut to cover. Of course Royal Caribbean had no choice about when to launch their biggest baby, it takes years to construct such a vessel and you can’t have a mega-ship sitting empty in dock because the global economy has taken a downturn. But there’s a double problem for the cruise line – they’ve built a ship with more cabins than any other, at the very time when people are spending less on holidays than ever before, or foregoing a holiday for the next year altogether. There are definitely still empty staterooms on the first official sailing of Oasis of the Seas which suggests that the cruise line might have problems filling the ship once the first rush of cruise enthusiasts wanting to sail on her is over. However, Adam Goldstein, president of Royal Caribbean International, says that not all of the rooms on the ship are open for booking on these first few cruises partly because the staff needs scope to ‘master operations’. This could mean that the company is holding back on some staterooms to allow discounting if they can’t fill the ship.