Allure of the Seas

Allure of the Seas was delivered by STX Europe at Turku in October 2010, a year after Oasis of the Seas and from the same drawings. She is fifty millimeters longer than her sister, a difference the yard measured and Royal Caribbean has enjoyed quoting ever since, and for fifteen years that was very nearly the whole list of differences. Then, in the spring of 2025, she went into a Spanish drydock and came out a materially different ship from the one tied up next to her.

The fifty millimeters, and what replaced them

Sister ships in this class were sold on being the same. If you had sailed Oasis you knew where everything on Allure was, down to which end of Central Park the steakhouse sat. What has happened since is that Royal Caribbean stopped refitting Oasis-class ships to a common standard and started refitting each one to whatever the current product happened to be. The later hulls diverged as they were built (Wonder arrived with an eighth neighborhood on top, Utopia arrived burning liquefied natural gas), and the first two have now diverged backwards, by retrofit.

Allure went to Navantia in Cádiz in February 2025 and returned to service on April 11 that year, after work costing more than $100 million. The headline item is the Ultimate Abyss, the ten-deck dry slide that drops off the back of the ship; it was designed into Harmony in 2016 and has now been cut into a hull built six years before it existed. The Perfect Storm slides went onto the pool deck, Cyclone and Typhoon racing side by side, and SuperCell, the champagne bowl that spins you before it drops you. The pool deck itself was rebuilt and the adults-only Solarium redesigned.

The rest is a list of rooms that did not exist aboard her before: The Mason Jar for Southern cooking and a live country band, Playmakers Sports Bar & Arcade, El Loco Fresh, the Pesky Parrot tiki bar, and The Lime & Coconut. Splashaway Bay and the Adventure Ocean children’s spaces were redone, a teen room called Social298 was built, and laser tag and an escape room were added. New suites were constructed above the bridge, the only part of the project that changed the shape of the ship rather than its contents.

What she still does not have is worth stating plainly. There is no Suite Neighborhood; that arrived with Wonder and stayed there. She is not gas-powered, she is not the largest ship in the world and has not been since 2016, and the underlying deck plan is the 2010 one. The refit gave her the 2025 attraction list. It did not give her the 2025 layout.

Where she actually sails

The Caribbean, from two ports. She spent the summer after her refit in Barcelona on Western Mediterranean weeks, which was the point of drydocking her in Spain, then crossed back. Through October 2026 she runs seven-night Caribbean itineraries out of Fort Lauderdale, and from late October 2026 she moves down the coast to Miami for the 2026–27 winter season and stays there.

The pattern in her schedule is a week, and it is the right length for her. Most sailings call at Perfect Day at CocoCay; a handful are shorter Bahamas runs of three or four nights. If a short Oasis-class sailing is what you are after, Utopia of the Seas is built around that idea and Allure is not; on her, the three-night departures are the exception and they will feel like a ship you did not have time to finish.

Who she suits

Families and groups who want the full Oasis-class range over seven nights, at a price that is usually a step below Icon, Utopia and Wonder. The refit means she now has the slides and the children’s spaces of a much newer ship, and the seven-night format gives you time to get to the far corners of her without standing in line for all of it.

She suits anyone who has sailed Oasis of the Seas and wants the same ship without the same week; the two are no longer interchangeable, and Allure is now the more equipped of the pair.

She does not suit anyone who wants a new ship. Fifteen years of hull is fifteen years of hull, and the cabins, the corridors and the elevator banks are the original ones even where the furniture is not. She does not suit anyone chasing quiet: five and a half thousand people at double occupancy is five and a half thousand people, and she carries them in a hull with no eighth neighborhood to spread them into. And she does not suit anyone who wants the Caribbean itself to be the trip; these are mainstream ports on a mainstream loop, and the reason people book her is what happens between them.