Independence of the Seas

Independence of the Seas is the third and last of the Freedom-class ships, and the one Royal Caribbean chose to experiment on. Aker Yards handed her over at Turku for around $828 million and she sailed her maiden voyage on May 2, 2008, into a job that has defined most of her life: she was the British market’s ship, based at Southampton, for most of her first decade, running the fjords and Iberia as a no-fly vessel for people who did not want to fly.

Then in May 2018 she became the first ship in the Royal Amplified program, the $900 million fleet-wide rebuild that has since been applied to a dozen hulls. Everything Royal Caribbean has done to an aging ship since was tried here first.

What being first meant

The 2018 refit cost over $100 million and it was, by the standards of what came after, a scattergun. Sky Pad went in: a geodesic dome with bungee trampolines and a virtual-reality headset, which debuted on this ship and was subsequently fitted to several others and then quietly removed from most of them. The Perfect Storm racing waterslides went on the back, a children’s aqua park with them. Battle for Planet Z, the glow-in-the-dark laser tag arena, took over Studio B on top of the ice rink, and The Observatorium escape room went in below. A hundred and seven new cabins were added, along with a rewritten dining and bar lineup.

What she is underneath all that is a stretched Voyager. The Freedom class took the Royal Promenade, the four-deck interior street with cabins looking down into it, added length, and used the extra top-deck room for the things the Voyagers could not fit: the FlowRider, the H2O Zone water park, and whirlpools cantilevered out past the hull with nothing but sea beneath them. She has the ice rink, the rock wall on the funnel and a two-story theater seating twelve hundred.

She does not have Central Park, the Boardwalk, an AquaTheater or any neighborhood structure. Those arrived with Oasis of the Seas a year and a half after her. The consequence is the same one her sisters Freedom and Liberty have: at around 154,000 tons and 3,836 guests she feels busier than her tonnage suggests, because there is one promenade and one pool deck and everyone is on them.

Where she actually sails

She has become Royal Caribbean’s Bermuda ship, and that is the most distinctive thing about her deployment.

Summers she is at Cape Liberty in Bayonne, working two programs out of the same berth. The staple is the Bermuda Getaway, five nights to the Royal Naval Dockyard and back, nineteen of them on this schedule, more than any other single itinerary she runs. Around them sit longer Bermuda weeks and a Canada and New England program of four to nine nights calling Saint John, Halifax, Portland, Boston and Sydney. The Royal Naval Dockyard is her third most-visited port after her two homeports, with forty-seven calls; no other ship in this fleet leans on Bermuda that hard.

Winters she moves to Miami and turns into a Caribbean ship: five- to nine-night Eastern, Western and Southern runs calling Perfect Day at CocoCay, George Town, San Juan, Nassau, Cozumel, Falmouth, Charlotte Amalie and Puerto Plata. That occupies November through April in both of the winters on this schedule, and a handful of nine- and ten-night repositioning sailings connect Cape Liberty and Miami at each turn.

Two seasons, two homeports, and both of them drive-to for a large population. There is no European deployment on her calendar; Southampton is her past, not her present.

Who she suits

People in the New York and New Jersey metro area, first of all. A five-night Bermuda run leaving from Bayonne with no airport in it is a genuinely rare product, and she is the ship that runs it most often. Families do well on the Bermuda sailings in particular; the Dockyard is a beach day, the two sea days at each end are what the slides and the ice rink are for.

She also suits anyone who wants a big ship at a mid-market price. The 2018 refit was seven years ago now, but it put the top deck and the food roughly where the newer ships are.

She does not suit anyone who wants space or quiet. One promenade, one pool deck, 3,836 guests, and on a five-night Bermuda sailing out of a cold-weather port the indoor rooms fill early. She does not suit anyone shopping for the current Royal Caribbean product (the neighborhoods, the ten-deck slides, the suite complexes) none of which is here.

And she does not suit anyone booking Bermuda for Bermuda. A five-night run gives you roughly two days at the Dockyard, and getting to the rest of the island from there takes a ferry or a bus. If the island is the reason, the seven- and nine-night versions on her calendar are the ones worth paying for.