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Boarding The LARGEST CRUISE SHIP IN THE WORLD! – Symphony of the Seas Inaugural Cruise

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The world’s largest cruise ship just opened its gangway, and two vloggers are the first ones up the ramp.

Eric and Allison of The Endless Adventure spent months building an audience out of a van and a backpack. In April 2018, Royal Caribbean handed them something considerably bigger: a stateroom aboard Symphony of the Seas, the newly delivered Oasis-class megaship kicking off its inaugural European cruise season out of Barcelona. Their video documents the first hour that matters most on any cruise — the walk up the gangway, the first look at the atrium, and the scramble to figure out where everything is before dinner.

• Symphony of the Seas was delivered to Royal Caribbean in late March 2018 from the Chantiers de l’Atlantique (STX France) shipyard, measuring 1,188 feet long and 215 feet wide across 16 guest decks.
• The ship registers at 228,081 gross tons with room for up to 6,680 passengers and 2,200 crew, making it the largest passenger cruise ship in the world at the time of its launch.
• Eric and Allison’s sponsored seven-day Mediterranean itinerary departed from Barcelona, giving them a full week to work through the ship’s seven distinct “neighborhoods.”

A Flagship Built to Outsize Everything Before It

Numbers get thrown around loosely in the cruise industry, but Symphony’s are difficult to overstate. At 1,188 feet stem to stern and spanning 215 feet across, the ship dwarfs the Titanic by nearly 300 feet and edges out its own Oasis-class siblings to claim the title of largest passenger vessel ever built. Sixteen guest decks and 228,081 gross tons translate into a floating resort carrying up to 6,680 passengers at double occupancy, backed by a crew of 2,200 keeping the whole operation running.

228,081 gross tons, 1,188 feet long, and room for 6,680 passengers — the numbers that made Symphony of the Seas the largest cruise ship on the water in 2018.

Those figures are abstract until you’re standing in the Royal Promenade watching a robotic arm mix a cocktail. That’s exactly the sequence Eric and Allison walk through in their vlog — footage that plays less like a commercial and more like the confused, delighted first pass every new cruiser makes trying to find their cabin.

Seven Neighborhoods Packed Into One Hull

Royal Caribbean designed the Oasis class around the idea of splitting one enormous ship into distinct districts rather than one long corridor of amenities, and Symphony leans into that harder than any vessel before it. The couple’s tour hits the Boardwalk, the ship’s carnival-style strip with its carousel and boardwalk-style eats, then the Royal Promenade, the three-story indoor thoroughfare home to the Bionic Bar’s robotic bartenders. From there it’s Central Park, the open-air deck planted with living trees and thousands of tropical plants, ringed by specialty restaurants including Jamie’s Italian and Chops Grille.

It’s a layout built for repeat visits rather than a single lap — something the crew behind other Royal Caribbean tours, like the Liberty of the Seas ship tour, have documented on a smaller scale for years. Symphony simply multiplies every one of those ideas by a wider hull and two extra decks.

The Ultimate Abyss and the Ship’s Water-Based Thrills

The signature attraction gets its own moment in the video: the Ultimate Abyss, a 10-story dry slide billed as the tallest at sea, dropping riders from the upper decks straight down to the Boardwalk. Pair that with the FlowRider surf simulators and the Perfect Storm water slide trio, and Symphony’s upper decks function less like a sundeck and more like an amusement park bolted to a hull.

Aft of all that sits the AquaTheater, an open-air amphitheater built for the line’s deep-diving, high-acrobatic water shows — the same style of production that’s become a signature of Royal Caribbean’s biggest ships. Between the slide, the surf pool, and the AquaTheater, the video makes clear why cruise vloggers keep circling back to Oasis-class ships the way other travel channels return to a typical day-at-sea itinerary or a straightforward one-week Caribbean sailing — there’s simply more ship to cover.

Eric and Allison’s episode ends where every embarkation video has to: bags dropped in the stateroom, six more days of Barcelona-to-Mediterranean sailing ahead, and an entire ship’s worth of restaurants and decks still unexplored. For a vessel carrying 6,680 passengers on its first full season, that’s really just the setup — the rest of the itinerary is where the real footage was always going to come from.