This was published 7 years ago
World's biggest cruise ships: Royal Caribbean's three giants create new world record
By Kylie McLaughlin
The world's three biggest cruise ships made history over the weekend, conducting their first ocean meet and greet.
The Royal Caribbean ships Oasis of the Seas, Allure of the Seas and the new Harmony of the Seas met mid-ocean on the eve of the latter ship's debut in US waters at her new home port of Port Everglades in Florida.
The meeting occurred on Friday, local time. The combined capacity of passengers for the three ships is more than 20,000 guests and 6800 crew.
The new ship has officially claimed the title of the world's largest cruise ship, weighing 1700 tonnes more than Royal Caribbean's older 'Oasis Class' ships, and 30cm longer.
Harmony of the Seas will travel from Florida across to the Caribbean to Mexico over seven-night itineraries during its season.
On board the giant ship, you'll find seven themed 'neighbourhoods', fast wi-fi, a 10-storey slide, robot bartenders and Jamie Oliver restaurants, and even a 'Central Park' - containing 12,000 plants and trees.
The world's three largest cruise ships meet for the first time.
It's hard to imagine finding time in the seven days for all the entertainment on board Harmony - the ship also contains a zipline, old world arcade games, a carousel, and waterslides - and this is just for the adults.
For some serious fun, though, there's no shortage of inventive bars, and 20 different restaurants to dine in, all which need to be able to feed and water a grand total of 5479 passengers on board, or 6780 if every berth is booked.
Harmony is unlikely to retain its title of world's largest cruise ship for long; Royal Caribbean are already constructing another, code-named Oasis IV, scheduled for launch mid-2018.
See also: Life aboard the world's biggest cruise ship
See also: 25 insider tips about cruise ships
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