Why the Oasis class continues to endure

Cruise line executives periodically talk about the need to anticipate what cruisers will want in a ship, not just next year but decades into the future. Longevity is a concern when you’re spending what it takes to build a big cruise ship (i.e. more than a billion dollars).

So it is notable that Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. just ordered a sixth edition of the Oasis of the Seas, a ship class first delivered in 2009. It has been 10 years since the Oasis made its debut, and it will be 14 years by the time Oasis VI arrives in 2023.

By any measure, the Oasis has proved to be a remarkably durable design. Few if any other ship classes have had a 14-year run.

Carnival Cruise Line’s eight Fantasy class ships, still sailing today, took nearly a decade to build: the Fantasy delivered in 1990 and the final ship, the Paradise, debuted eight years later.  Norwegian Cruise Line has six Breakaway or Breakaway Plus ships delivered or on order, which cover the years 2013 to 2019.

Royal Caribbean’s own Voyager class, which introduced the Royal Promenade concept, stretched only five years and five ships from the Voyager of the Seas in 1999 to the Mariner of the Seas in 2003.

Part of the reason classes end is that cruise lines have felt the need to build bigger ships. With Oasis class, that hasn’t been much of a temptation. At 225,000 gross tons, the first Oasis was far bigger than any other class to begin with.

RCCL has tweaked new Oasis vessels incrementally by a couple of inches here, a few gross tons there, so that each can claim the title of the world’s biggest cruise ship.  Oasis VI is expected to displace 231,000 gross tons and carry more than 5,700 passengers at double occupancy.

The Oasis class has legs in part because its unique design has proven more popular with cruisers than even RCCL officials imagined.

A second reason that Oasis-class shipbuilding will span a decade and a half is the cost to build each new ship, which is approaching $1.5 billion each. That pales next to the $13 billion the U.S. Navy spent on its largest ship, the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford, but for a private corporation it takes time between ships to digest the financing of such an investment.

Will RCCL stop at six? There’s really no telling. Chairman Richard Fain once said he had a hard time imagining the need for more than two Oasis ships — and here we are.

About the only competition I can think of for the title of longest-enduring ship class comes from Viking Ocean Cruises. It has one design and is sticking to it: A class of 930-passenger vessels that began with the Viking Star in 2014 and now numbers at least 14 with deliveries scheduled through 2027.