It must have been years since the arrival of a single cruise ship at Southampton created such interest. The PR machine had been working overtime for the previous week attracting the Daily Express and TV news to this story: The world’s newest and largest cruise liner had stopped over for a few days on her maiden voyage.

Hundreds of people lined the shores of Southampton Water to watch her pass by, and a steady stream of visitors came to see if she was as big as they said—and she was.

The Explorer of the Seas berthed at Southampton Dock’s QE2 Terminal in early October. It is a sign of the times that this 142,000-ton, 1,020-foot-long ship is over twice the size of the QE2 itself. At 15 decks high, the Explorer dwarfs the terminal buildings.

All the ship’s numbers are immense. It will carry 3,114 passengers in great comfort but is licensed to carry over 5,000 passengers and a crew of 1,185. There is more deck space per passenger than any other cruise liner afloat (total deck space is nearly 700,000 square feet). The ship uses close to 1,900 miles of electric cable connected at around 60,000 different points, and that doesn’t even include the A/V facilities.

No need to walk the plank: Among its other attractions, the Explorer has a 1,350-seat theater to keep passengers entertained on long voyages.

A FLEET OF GIANTS
The Explorer is the newest addition to the fleet of the US-based Royal Caribbean International cruise line. November 1999 saw the launch of Voyager of the Seas, the Explorer’s sister ship, only slightly smaller and the proving ground for much of the design and facilities included in the Explorer. Due in 2001 is The Adventurer of the Seas, still under construction. Two more ships will follow in what is known as the Voyager class. All are being built at the Kvaerner Masa-Yards at Turku, Finland, which the Explorer had left only days before arriving at Southampton, following 10 months of fitting-out and sea trials. The main purpose of the UK stopover during her maiden voyage was to allow 6,000 UK and European travel agents the opportunity to experience the ship and its facilities on two short cruises around the Channel Islands. The Explorer then sailed for New York for a naming ceremony before travelling to her home port in Miami where she started all-year-round weekly cruises of the eastern Caribbean.

For RCI, these ships represent considerable investments, estimated at around half a billion dollars each. The fantastic growth in the cruise segment of the tourist industry over the last decade represents a complete turnaround for what was once seen as an “older person’s vacation.” Jack Williams, president of Royal Caribbean International, acknowledged the changing trend: “The Voyager-class series is designed to capture the imagination of today’s vacationer and change the way people view cruising.” The current generation of cruise liners are small floating cities with a similar cross section of leisure activities and a depth of options to fill passengers’ cruise time that almost distracts from the fact that one is at sea. The areas where passengers can simply relax and watch the ocean pass by are fairly limited. Cruises are becoming activity holidays where being at sea is almost incidental. “We are in the leisure business,” commented a member of the Explorer’s crew when questioned about how the cruises are affected by bad weather. “If we see bad weather, we avoid it.”

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