An Oasis-size News Roundup

Oasis of the Seas arrives Fort Lauderdale.

Photo courtesy Royal Caribbean

There seems to be no getting around it: Oasis of the Seas is the dominating story in the cruise world, and show no signs of letting up in advance of its anticipated maiden voyage at the end of the month.  In fact, Royal Caribbean may be intent on pushing the publicity envelope if recent accounts on their Twitter page are any indication: Oasis of the Seas will have seven - yes, seven - godmothers. 

Christening a ship is an enormous undertaking even with one godmother - no information on how Royal Caribbean plans to handle seven was available at this time.  Which begs the question: is Royal Caribbean running the risk of over-hyping Oasis of the Seas?

An interesting event occurred during Royal Caribbean's last quarterly conference call with industry observers and analysts.  One such person questioned Royal Caribbean CEO Richard Fain about whether RCI felt they were devaluing their older, less appealing ships.  Fain quickly set the gentleman straight, saying the line values all its ships.  At the time, the question seemed a little flippant on the part of the reporter, but with continued press events, it seems the overriding theme being communicated, at least to the media, is this ship is better than anything else we have in our fleet.

Which of course is not the case - Royal Caribbean takes better care of its older ships than many other lines do.  The question remains, though - how does Royal Caribbean, as innovative, forward thinking, and creative as they are, plan to fill a 6,000-plus passenger vessel every single week?

Also in our news roundup: the overshadowed Carnival Dream has set sail from New York for its homeport of Port Canaveral, Florida, and Seabourn Odyssey arrived in Fort Lauderdale this week after her maiden transatlantic crossing from Europe. 

Holland America's Nieuw Amsterdam was floated out of the docks at the Fincantieri shipyard just off Venice, Italy.  It will be a direct sister ship to Eurodam, and the fourth vessel to bear that name. 

Also in the news, Silversea's Silver Spirit took to the water for her sea trials last week, which were reportedly a great success. 

That concludes our news roundup for today - hopefully two more weeks won't pass before our next update!