Serenade of the Seas

Serenade of the Seas is the third of the four Radiance-class ships, handed over by Meyer Werft at the end of July 2003. She is mechanically the same animal as her sisters (gas turbines, Azipods, a Panamax hull and about three acres of glass), and what separates her from them is a single voyage. In December 2023 she left Miami on the Ultimate World Cruise and did not come back until September 10, 2024: 274 nights, 65 countries, and the longest itinerary Royal Caribbean has ever sold.

The world cruise, and what it proves

Nine months is an unusual thing to ask of a 2003 hull carrying 2,148 guests. It was also a deliberate choice of ship rather than a compromise. The world cruise needed a vessel small enough to enter the ports that make a nine-month itinerary worth doing, fast enough to make the long ocean legs on schedule, and stable enough that people would still be aboard in month eight. The Radiance class was the only thing in the fleet that fit all three, and Serenade was the hull that drew it.

She came back from that voyage with a reputation she did not have before. A ship that spent nine months at sea with the same several hundred people aboard is a ship whose crew got very good at the long haul, and it is why she keeps drawing the fleet’s awkward, spread-out deployments.

A ship for three coasts

Her year is split across three homeports and two oceans. The largest part of what is on sale runs from San Diego down the Mexican Riviera, on sailings from a weekend to a fortnight. In the northern summer she moves to Vancouver for seven-night Alaska cruises, with a few short Pacific Northwest runs at the edges of the season. And she takes a block of Caribbean weeks out of Tampa.

That is three markets that mostly want different ships, and she works all of them for the same reason: 962 feet and 90,090 tons go where the big hulls will not, and she can cover the repositioning distance between them without losing a week.

What is aboard

Chops Grille, Giovanni’s Italian Kitchen and Izumi are the specialty restaurants; Windjammer and the main dining room are the included ones. The Schooner Bar and Boleros are where the evenings happen, and there is an English pub for the acoustic sets. Outside there is a solarium pool under a retractable glass roof, a rock climbing wall forty feet up, and a nine-hole miniature golf course.

What is not aboard: a surf simulator, a water park, an ice rink, or any of the attractions that Royal Caribbean’s marketing has been built around for fifteen years. She predates all of it and she was never amplified.

Who she suits

People sailing for the destination (Alaska, the Mexican coast, a long repositioning) who want a ship with a lot of window and not much noise. On a Gulf of Alaska day the glass-roofed solarium is worth more than any water slide. Long-cruise regulars like her, and the ones who did the world cruise talk about her the way people talk about a boat they owned.

She is the wrong ship for a family looking for the big-ship Royal Caribbean experience, and she is the wrong ship for anyone who will be bored without programmed activity. The public rooms are modest, the theater is small, and there is no getting around the fact that the interior design is from 2003 and has been refreshed rather than replaced.