Explorer of the Seas

Explorer of the Seas is the second of the five Voyager-class ships and the only cruise ship anybody has ever fitted with a working scientific laboratory. Kværner Masa-Yards completed her at Turku in September 2000, and for her first seven years she carried an atmospheric and oceanographic lab operated by the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School, real instruments, real researchers, sampling the sea and the air along a commercial ship’s track through the Caribbean. It was discontinued in 2007. The space is something else now, and no ship since has bothered.

That is a good introduction to her, because the Voyager class was full of ideas nobody had tried. The Royal Promenade, an interior street four decks high with bars and shops down it and cabins looking into it, was invented on these hulls, as was putting an ice rink and a rock-climbing wall on a cruise ship. Almost everything Royal Caribbean has built since is a descendant. What that leaves for a passenger in 2026 is a ship with recognizably modern bones and a 2000 layout wrapped around them.

The refit that took three years to happen

She was scheduled for the Royal Amplified treatment in spring 2020: $110 million at Cadiz, a full rebuild of the top of the ship. The yard closed, the industry stopped, and the work was cut back and rescheduled. It was finally completed in early 2023.

What she has now is the Perfect Storm complex (the Cyclone and Typhoon racing slides, plus Tidal Wave, the raft slide that drops hard and then runs up a nearly vertical wall) over a rebuilt Lido pool deck with casitas, daybeds and in-pool loungers, and the Lime and Coconut bar stacked three levels above it. Below, Giovanni’s Italian Kitchen, a Playmakers sports bar with a wall of televisions, Johnny Rockets Express and a Starbucks went in, the Solarium was redone, and Studio B gained a glow-in-the-dark laser tag game. The FlowRider surf simulator is older than all of it; that arrived in 2015, replacing the original inline skating rink.

She had a further three weeks at Cadiz in the autumn of 2025, but that was classification work, hull painting and hotel touch-ups rather than another rebuild.

The honest summary is that she has a 2023 top deck on a 2000 hull. She has no Central Park, no Boardwalk, no neighborhood structure; those are Oasis-class ideas from nine years after her. When she is full, everyone ends up on the promenade, and the promenade is the best room aboard precisely because there is nowhere else that size to be.

Where she actually sails

Two seasons a year on two sides of the Atlantic, and she changes Florida homeports between them.

Summers are the Mediterranean and the Adriatic, and Ravenna is the anchor. She runs seven-night weeks out of Ravenna, Rome, Barcelona and Athens, many of them open-jaw (Ravenna to Rome, Rome to Barcelona, Athens to Ravenna) under names like Italy & Croatia, Greek Isles and Italy, Spain & French Riviera. Santorini, Athens, Mykonos, Split, Messina, Dubrovnik and Kotor are the calls that come up most. If you are shopping her European weeks, read the disembarkation port before you book the flight home; a large share of them do not end where they started.

Winters are Florida, and the base moves. She crosses westbound from Barcelona at the end of October 2026 and spends that winter at Port Canaveral on four- to nine-night Caribbean and Bahamas runs, Nassau, CocoCay, Labadee, Grand Turk, Costa Maya, Falmouth. She crosses back to Europe in late April 2027 for a second Mediterranean season, then repositions again in November 2027, this time to Fort Lauderdale, where she stays through April 2028 on six- to eight-night Caribbean weeks.

Three transatlantic crossings connect all of that, thirteen and fourteen nights each, sold as one-way voyages.

Who she suits

People who want a genuinely large ship on a European itinerary without paying Oasis- or Icon-class money. The Adriatic weeks are the best use of her: seven nights, five or six ports, and a ship with an ice rink and three waterslides for the days in between. Families do well, and so do first-timers, because a Voyager-class ship is enough of everything without being overwhelming.

She does not suit anyone comparing her against the current fleet. The cabins are 2000 cabins (small, with a bathroom you will notice) a large share of them inside or promenade-view, and no refit moves a stairwell. She does not suit anyone who wants quiet: one promenade, one main pool deck, 3,282 guests.

And she is the wrong ship for anyone who wants a settled routine. She spends roughly half of every year repositioning, changing continents, changing homeports, and even changing which Florida port she uses between one winter and the next. Book the itinerary rather than the ship, and check the map twice.