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You know you're riding high when birds are flying below you. From the top deck of the Carnival Splendor docked in Malaga, Spain, I'm even looking down at the famed tower of the city's baroque cathedral. And on the dock far below, I can see a stream of buses moving in military precision to load more than 3,000 passengers heading out on shore excursions.
Welcome to the new normal in cruising: supersize. The newly launched Splendor is so big it has more than twice the heft of the Titanic. In fact, it's among the largest passenger vessels ever built, bigger than any of the fabled liners of the 1930s, and longer, wider and more populated than ships that were considered wonders of mega-engineering just a few years ago.
And this ship is hardly a fluke. It's as though every cruise line is telling its ship designers the same thing: Take the plan and blow it up by 20 per cent. Wait, can you make that 50 per cent bigger? And while you're at it, stack on a few extra decks for good measure.
Most of the dozen ships coming out this year and next carry considerably more than 2,000 passengers, with the Splendor capable of tucking in as many as 3,600.
Royal Caribbean's Oasis of the Seas, coming next year (and ramping up the hype already), can accommodate a mind-boggling 6,400 passengers. It's so wide it has a multistorey canyon in the centre and guests will be offered a choice of either a sea view or a suite that faces onto the Central Park within this middle realm, complete with a tropical garden and ponds.
The expansive trend is redefining what is considered a small, medium and large ship. When Royal Caribbean introduced the 2,270-passenger Sovereign of the Seas in 1988, it was considered an unbelievable behemoth. This year, on the other hand, Holland America's newly launched ship Eurodam — carrying 2,100 passengers — is being advertised as "mid-sized."
Even small luxury lines are expanding their waist sizes. Seabourn Cruises and Silversea Cruises, known for ships that carry only a couple of hundred passengers, are planning to double up capacity on their new builds.
But this bulking up is not just for bragging rights: There are many reasons why bigger really is better, says Splendor's Duncan Puttock. Foremost is efficiency. Modern engines burn as much as 30 per cent less fuel and new designs include scrubbers to reduce the exhaust pollution. In a sense, each new cruise ship replaces two older, less efficient ships.
Costs of other supplies also drop dramatically when you're buying in container loads rather than dozens, he adds. And there is less waste cooking for thousands of passengers than for a few hundred.
For the passengers, the benefits include larger cabins, most of which have balconies. This extra space results from scrapping a long-held belief that vessels have to be narrow enough to fit through the Panama Canal.
Because most cruise ships spend most of their time in the Caribbean or Mediterranean, "post-Panama" designers are dramatically widening ships. The Oasis of the Seas will be nearly 50 metres wide. That's 18 metres wider than Cunard's QE2, for years the biggest passenger ship afloat.
Significantly, the savings from economies of scale are also passed on to passengers. Brochure prices on the big ships start at about $150 a day and promotional specials regularly bring them under $100 a day — about what it would have cost two decades ago to sail on less elaborate ships with smaller cabins.
All this has allowed Carnival, the original mass-market cruise line, to be much more inventive with its cuisine as well. When Puttock first started with the company 20 years ago, a cruise ship that carried 1,200 was considered massive. "At lunch time, a buffet line opened up and the choice was hot dogs, hamburgers, coleslaw and potato salad on a paper plate with plastic forks," he says
Today, you can go to a food court the size of a shopping mall with Indian, Szechuan or deli choices. Or you can order pizza on good china, with hotel-style cutlery and table service. And they aren't cutting corners with ingredients: There's U.S. prime beef, Swiss chocolate, and snack mixes and nuts rather than pretzels at the bars.
Despite the mass setting, there is ample personal space on the Carnival Splendor. As I sit sipping a cappuccino and reading a paper on Deck 14, I have the deck to myself. Even on the popular Lido, with its pool and big video screen, there are always lounge chairs available.
