Enchantment of the Seas

Enchantment of the Seas is a Vision-class ship from 1997, and she is seventy-three feet longer than she was built. In 2005 Royal Caribbean took her to Rotterdam, cut her in half across the middle, pulled the two halves apart and welded a prefabricated section in between. It is by a wide margin the most interesting thing about her.

The stretch

She entered dry dock at Keppel Verolme in Rotterdam on May 15, 2005. The 73-foot midbody had been built ahead of time at Aker Finnyards in Finland and floated down, which is the whole trick; the yard is not building a new section while the ship waits, it is welding one on. The hull was severed, drawn apart, and the new piece dropped into the gap. She was back carrying passengers on July 7, less than two months after she arrived.

The numbers moved a long way for seventy-three feet. She went from 916 feet to 989 and from 74,000 gross tons to 82,910, which is nearly nine thousand tons of added volume, because the section is full-depth, running down through the accommodation decks as well as across the pool deck. It brought 151 new cabins with it. She is now the largest of the six Vision-class ships by tonnage, which is a strange thing to be true of a hull that was launched smaller than two of them.

What twenty-nine years looks like

It looks like this: eleven passenger decks, a seven-story Centrum with glass elevators, a solarium pool under a roof that slides back, a rock climbing wall forty feet up the funnel, and a specialty restaurant list that runs to Chops Grille and Park Café and stops. The production shows are Stage to Screen and Can’t Stop the Rock. There is a casino, an arcade, and a Vitality Spa. There is no water park, no surf simulator, no ice rink, and no promenade.

She does have one genuinely uncommon piece of equipment. She and her sister Grandeur of the Seas were the first two major cruise ships fitted with a dynamic positioning system, which holds the ship in place on thrusters instead of an anchor, useful at tender ports, where it means the ship stays put and level while the boats run.

The honest summary is that she is a small, old, plain ship with an unusually good amount of glass in her, and the 2024 dry dock refreshed her rather than rebuilt her.

Tampa, and only Tampa

Her whole schedule runs from Tampa: four- to eight-night Caribbean sailings, most of them a week, year-round. There is no European season, no repositioning, no second homeport.

Tampa is a port for the smaller end of the fleet, and Royal Caribbean staffs it that way, Enchantment shares the market with the Radiance-class ships and almost nothing bigger. If you are sailing from the Gulf Coast and do not want to fly to Florida’s east coast, she is one of a handful of options, and she is the oldest of them.

Who she suits

People who want a straightforward week in the Caribbean on a ship that is easy to walk around, who are sailing from Tampa because it is close, and who care more about the ports and the price than about what is on the top deck. The solarium is good. The Centrum is good. She is small enough that you learn her in a day.

She is the wrong ship for families expecting the modern Royal Caribbean product, and it is worth being blunt: almost none of it is aboard. She is also the wrong ship if you want a new one. The steel is from the mid-1990s, a good deal of the interior is from 2005, and a dry dock refreshes finishes; it does not change the fact that this is a twenty-nine-year-old vessel with eleven passenger decks and a welded joint across her middle.