Five times as big as the Titanic, one of the world’s biggest cruise ships is worth splashing out on
Ed Grenby - 24 June 2025
It was when I tried to ask the robot barman to laser me up some pork scratchings that I knew things had gone too far. I was onboard Wonder of the Seas, which was, at the time, the world’s biggest cruise ship. (This was in 2022 but, hard to believe, it has already been surpassed in size twice since then, with Channel 4’s new series, Secrets of Supercruisers, focusing on two of the current crop of biggies.)
I had been at sea for a couple of days, and had become so used to the frankly bonkers stuff aboard (waterslides, ziplines, pianists playing in the lifts, inflatable laser-tag labyrinth on an ice rink…) that I barely batted an eyelid when I walked into one of the two-dozen-odd bars and found a robot arm mixing the drinks.
Ordering my Old Fashioned via a keypad, and having it dispensed with a speed and precision not even Tom Cruise in Cocktail could match, I unthinkingly opened my mouth to ask about a little bag of something salty and crunchy to go with it. The machine stared blankly at me, and I wandered off to find sustenance elsewhere (not hard with a full 40 restaurants and bars available across the ship’s 18 decks).
That’s what life is like aboard the supercruisers: a strange mix of sybaritic spoiling (I’ll say it again: 40 restaurants and bars), exciting adventure (waking up each morning with a whole new destination to explore) and absurd gimmickry (a “FlowRider” artificial wave machine so you can practise surfing on the sundeck? Why ever not – see the pictorial evidence in the picture, right).
Wonder is a big old boat – with space for 7,000 passengers and 2,300 crew – but it’s not an ugly monstrosity. Ships this size are regularly referred to as “cities at sea”, but with no vandalism, vape litter or fried chicken shops, it’s not like any city I know. Instead, I find a perfect, Pleasantville utopia of merrily bustling boutique-lined avenues, pocket-sized tree-shaded parks and suntrap squares where musicians tootle winningly (when they’re not rostered to play in those elevators).
Meanwhile, if being trapped in a lift with a beaming busker is your idea of hell, you can avoid them at least some of the time by taking Ultimate Abyss instead. It’s the longest enclosed slide at sea, proclaims the cruise line Royal Caribbean proudly, and it whizzes you from deck 16 (the Sports Zone) to deck 6 (the Boardwalk) quicker than you can say, “Aaaaarrrrrggghh!”.
It’s also handy if you’re prone to getting lost – which isn’t difficult to do on a ship this size. I see some truly spectacular shows over my weekend onboard (most notably the one where acrobats dive 30 feet into tiny pools of water while others tight-rope around them in a display of killer choreography), but manage to miss the ice-dance extravaganza because I can’t find the ice rink. Only on a supercruiser, I suspect, could a man misplace an actual ice rink.
Finding your cabin can be pretty confusing, too (certainly after a couple of Old Fashioneds, anyway). With 9,000 souls onboard, the stateroom corridors are so long they look like something the heroine would run down in a Hollywood-movie nightmare sequence – but worse, because they have inspiring slogans on the walls. “Dream big”, “Reach for the stars” and “Love out loud”, they tell us (though I wouldn’t advise the latter. Cabins use their limited space really cleverly, but the walls are pretty thin…).
In the end, the numbers tell their own story. Wonder of the Seas is 32 London buses long, 2.6 blue whales wide, five times as large as the Titanic, and I counted 126 different options available at breakfast in the main restaurant (which, incidentally, can cater to more than 1,000 muesli-munchers at a time). But the real “secret of the supercruisers”? The almost life-saving tip I’m here to pass on, thanks to my own first-hand experience on these gigantic ships? It’s to write yourself a “leaving your cabin” checklist. Stick a piece of paper to the inside of your stateroom door listing all those easily forgotten items you potentially might want or need while away from your cabin (keycard, sunglasses, swimming costume, suncream… the works). Because the most important statistic I learnt
onboard Wonder of the Seas wasn’t its 362-metre length or 236,857 gross tonnage – it’s that it took me 16 minutes to get from my lounger to my cabin and back when I realised I’d come out without my hat. You have been warned.
It was when I tried to ask the robot barman to laser me up some pork scratchings that I knew things had gone too far. I was onboard Wonder of the Seas, which was, at the time, the world’s biggest cruise ship. (This was in 2022 but, hard to believe, it has already been surpassed in size twice since then, with Channel 4’s new series, Secrets of Supercruisers, focusing on two of the current crop of biggies.)