Freedom of the Seas

Freedom of the Seas was the largest passenger ship in the world when Aker Yards handed her over at Turku in April 2006, and she held the title until Oasis of the Seas arrived in November 2009. Three years is a long run at the top and it is not really what she is remembered for. What she is remembered for is the FlowRider, a surf simulator bolted to the stern of a cruise ship, which nobody had done before and which Royal Caribbean has put on almost everything it has built since.

What the class actually was

The Freedom ships are stretched Voyager-class ships rather than a new idea. The layout is the same: a Royal Promenade four decks high running most of the length of the hull, with cabins looking down into it, an ice rink, a rock wall on the funnel, and the dining rooms and theater hung off either end. What the extra length bought was the top-deck space for the things the Voyagers could not fit, the FlowRider, the H2O Zone water park, and a pair of whirlpools cantilevered out past the side of the hull with nothing but sea underneath them.

It is worth saying plainly what she is not. She has no Central Park, no Boardwalk, no open-air theater at the stern. Those are Oasis-class ideas and they came three years after her. Freedom is a promenade ship, and the promenade is an indoor street, not a garden.

The 2020 refit

She went into dry dock in early 2020 for a $116 million rebuild and came out substantially rearranged above the pool deck. The pool deck was demolished and redone. The Perfect Storm went on the back, three stories of racing waterslides. The Lime and Coconut went up as a two-level bar with its own rooftop sun deck. Playmakers, the sports bar with the arcade, took over space on the promenade, and Giovanni’s Italian Kitchen, El Loco Fresh and Izumi Hibachi & Sushi replaced the older restaurant lineup. Adventure Ocean was gutted and rebuilt, and a laser tag arena went in.

The timing was bad in a way nobody could have planned for: she came out of that dry dock into the year the industry stopped sailing, and almost nobody saw the new ship until 2021. The practical consequence for anyone booking her now is that the top of this vessel is six years old and the hull under it is twenty.

Where she sails

Two jobs, on two sides of the Atlantic. The bulk of her schedule is short-format work out of Miami: three-, four- and five-night runs to the Bahamas and the Western Caribbean, with a scattering of longer weeks. The median sailing on offer is five nights, which tells you what the ship is being sold as: a long weekend where the vessel is most of the product.

The other half of the year she is in Southampton, running Northern Europe (Norwegian fjords, Spain, France) as a no-fly ship for the British market, with short breaks of two to five nights alongside the full-length cruises. Two transatlantic crossings a year connect the two seasons and are sold as one-way voyages.

Who she suits

Families, and anyone who wants a busy ship on a short itinerary. On a four-night Bahamas run she is a good deal of ship for the money and the refit gave her a top deck that competes with much newer vessels. The Southampton sailings are the better use of her, a full week with real ports at the end of it.

She does not suit anyone looking for quiet or for a lot of window. The Royal Promenade is her spine and it is an interior street; the ship faces inward in a way that the Radiance and Vision ships do not. Nor does she suit anyone shopping for the current Royal Caribbean product (the neighborhoods, the ten-deck slides, the suite complexes) because none of that is here and no refit was going to put it here.