Cruise ships are already massive. If you’ve been on one or stood next to one, you really know what I’m talking about, because up close, the scale is really something to behold.
And still, Royal Caribbean is asking us to hold their beer.
Their Icon of the Seas is breaking every single record out there – by quite a bit – and is about to set sail in early 2024.
Image Credit: Royal Caribbean International
The vessel is currently being completed in a Finnish shipyard.
Image Credit: Royal Caribbean International
The Icon weighs a quarter million tons – five times more than the Titanic – and is almost 1,200 feet long.
Image Credit: Royal Caribbean International
It can entertain 5,610 guests at once and house 2,350 crew members on its 20 decks.
Image Credit: Royal Caribbean International
With six water slides, seven pools, and nine whirlpools, I hope everyone packs plenty of sunscreen.
Image Credit: Royal Caribbean International
The middle will also feature a “Central Park” with “thousands of real plants.”
People are less than enthralled with what, even in renderings, appeared monstrous and something straight out of the Hunger Games Capitol.
“This feels like the setting Pixar would use for a movie anthropomorphizing all the nasty stuff that lives in your gut.”
https://twitter.com/limitlessjest/status/1678465468510908416
This person calls it a “monstrosity” and observes that it “does NOT look relaxing…at all.”
https://twitter.com/ingridsfineart/status/1678603488744337413
In a post-Covid world, plenty of people could think of nothing but the disease that would surely run rampant while so many thousands of people were trapped in a tight space.
In addition to personal health and safety, plenty of people are rightfully worried about the cruise industry’s not-insignificant contribution to pollution and greenhouse emissions – a normal size cruise ship pollutes more than 12,000 cars.
Image Credit: Royal Caribbean International
I don’t even know what to say about this one, y’all.
That’s capitalism in action, I guess.