LARGEST CRUISE SHIP in the WORLD! - what’s it like? | Wonder of the Seas

This is the largest cruise ship in the world and we're spending a whole week sailing the Caribbean and I'm going to show you what it's like. I mean, how big is it? So Royal Caribbean's Wonder of the Seas spans 1,188 feet in length, which is the equivalent to over three football fields and 215 feet in width. The ship has 24 guest elevators and 18 decks, all of which are designed to accommodate a total of 7,084 guests. And during our trip, we actually learned from guest services that the ship was pretty much full. So this is going to give you a good indicator of what it's like at capacity. As you can imagine, there was a lot of things to do on board. There were over eight different neighborhoods and I'm going to go through some of our favorites. The boardwalk was this kind of like Coney Island, East Coast style fairground. There was a carousel that we rode many times with Elliot and there were never really any lineups for it. So we just hopped right on and did a few rounds of that. There's like a candy shop, hot dog shop, sports bar, rock climbing wall and the aqua theater. One point during the cruise, there was actually like a carnival that they threw on. So they had like little mini games and a lot of different like carnival style food, like cotton candy. So it was a really fun area to just hang out with. Central Park was just a stunning part of the ship. You had trees, bushes. Inside was a lot of specialty restaurants. So you had like your more higher end restaurants on the ship. It was especially beautiful at night time. You could just walk through it. So both the boardwalk and the Central Park area were outdoor spaces because of the design of the ship. They just were open to the outdoor area, which made it feel like you weren't on a ship. Connecting the boardwalk, you'd have the promenade section. Now, this was actually covered. So it was the interior of the ship. So inside was a couple of different food places. You had shopping. They actually did a big parade through the promenade a couple of times during our trip, as well as they had like a welcome party and other things. If something was happening on the ship, it was probably happening in the promenade. It really felt like more of like the admin area. It was like the main hub of where you would go when you need to get something on the ship. So then we have the solarium, which is an adult-only zone. And honestly, I wish we could spend more time in here because it looked stunning. I took up the whole bow. It was undercover. So you're kind of protected from the elements. There was multiple pools, hot tubs, and their own buffet that you could eat at there. So like if you want to know kids cruise, which I totally get, the solarium is like your jam. That's the place to be. Now at the stern of the ship was the wonder playscapes. And this was like the kids zone. You had a multi-story jungle gym, essentially, that had slides and climbing areas. So your kids could go wild on there. And then on the lower part of it was kind of like the more younger kid area. So like we had our toddler there playing on the little animals and running around with all the little activities. Now there wasn't like a ton of things to do, but it's enough. Like you could spend maybe like an hour or so there easily. There was also a zip line that went across the whole boardwalk area, as well as a flow rider. So, you know, if you wanted to attempt to surf. And then there was the ultimate abyss, which is their crazy, I believe, 10-story slide. So it goes from the 16th floor all the way down to the sixth floor to the bottom of the boardwalk area. So if you wanted a really quick way to get from the top of the ship to the bottom, you can just take the slide. Then you have the pool deck, which was really composed of like four different pools and then multiple kind of like whirlpool hot tubs just kind of scattered throughout. There's also multiple water slides that you could do, as well as two different water parks, one for toilet-trained kids and one for not toilet-trained kids, which there was definitely an incident when we were there. And I really enjoyed the fact that they had the different style water parks because he's not big into like huge splashes and, you know, water park stuff, which some of the older kids would really want. Then moving back into the ship, you had a card room, an arcade, a childcare zone called Adventure Ocean, where there was like day activities that you could do with the kids, as well as childcare if you needed it, if you wanted to break from your children, as well as the Casino Royale, which was the massive casino. You know, I walked through there once. It was nice. Anyways. Now, obviously with the ship only being a year old, the rooms were in great condition. It had modern stylings. Everything was clean and nice and new. And I felt like there was actually a lot of space. And I was quite impressed with the size of the bathroom as well. So when you're booking your room on the ship, there's actually multiple balcony options you could choose from. You can get ocean view, which we got. You could get a central park view, which also would be a beautiful balcony view because you'd be overlooking all the trees. Fairly quiet because that area is a fairly quiet area. And you can get a balcony overlooking the boardwalk. And this is the one I would caution you to because it is quite loud in the boardwalk area, especially because the Aqua Theater is right there. And they do shows like up to like 10 p.m. at night, I believe there was a show. So I don't know how good the exterior soundproofing is. As well as if you are somebody that knows that you're not really gonna spend a lot of time in your room and there's so many places to hang out and things to do on the ship that you really don't need to spend a bunch of time in your room, but just get an interior room and save some money. So there are 25 different dining options to choose from. I'm talking multiple bars and lounges and various restaurants. Now, some are like the specialty restaurants that you have to pay for, as well as just other restaurants that they had that you didn't have to pay for that were just like included in your base fare. Now we are new to cruising and we didn't know this, but when you book your cruise, you actually select what dining, like your main dining option that you want. And Royal Caribbean has this thing called My Time, which is the more flexible dining option as opposed to like set dining times. Now on our ship, the earlier dining time, like the 5 p.m. dining time was full. Now that being said, the longest time that we did wait was like 15 minutes to get a seat in the dining room. And that was using like the My Time dining. Plus all the food came very, very quickly considering they were like feeding 3000 people at one time. It was also the easiest for me being that I eat vegetarian and vegan to just not have to worry about it. I just chose the vegan option and there was always one vegan option for all three courses. And I was like, yep, just give me that. Then there was the Windjammer Buffet where we spent a lot of time here. We ate pretty much every single, almost every single breakfast here. We ate lunch here. Usually we even had dinner here a few times. It was just quick, easy. We could get the food, we could sit down. So we opted not to get any of the dining packages since it was our first cruise and we didn't know how our toddler would be, except for we did do one special to restaurants. We did the Wonderland. I thought it would be the most fun because they have all these really weird, different like food. I don't know how to describe it. They do weird things with their food and it was really enjoyable, but it was two hours. And bless our toddler's heart, he did end up sitting through it all. So if it was just us or if we had some older kids, I would love to have tried more of the specialty restaurants. There were so many cool specialty restaurants. So I think I would have loved to have had a dining package and really been able to explore some of those. We also didn't get any kind of drinks package and that was just more of like our personal preference. Although Matt did end up buying a few just drinks on his own, which were about $15 each. So that's not too bad. Now there was a lot of different entertainment options. I ended up going to three different live shows and I wish I could have gone to more. So they ended up opening up reservations for all of these shows before the sailing happened and they booked up very fast. They were all sold out, which I was kind of bummed out about. So I didn't actually think I was gonna see any of the shows. But once we got on the ship, I don't know, maybe they opened up more tickets. That is when you can book up some more of the showtimes. But reservations end 15 minutes prior to the showtime. So if you go 10 minutes before showtime, you can just get any of the empty seats, which is what I did for two of the shows. And by the end of the cruise, most of the people that wanted to see the shows already had seen them. So they were kind of emptier anyway. So I just walked right in to the ice skating show and no problem. There's also several more adult entertainment options available, like bars where they would have live comedy. There was a huge music hall, which they would have live music. And there was child-friendly entertainment options. At the Adventure Ocean, we went to a little puppet show in the glow in the dark and Elliot loved it. We actually plan on going more in depth of what it's like cruising with a toddler in a future video. So if you would like to watch that, make sure you hit the subscribe button so you don't miss out. As well as if you're just enjoying this video, I would love for you to stick around. And if you're looking for just more general tips on travel, I have a how-to ebook that has 259 pages of all my best travel advice for planning, packing, you name it. Links will be in the description. So if you wanna check that out. Now there were several different health and wellness facilities as well. If you know, eating and drinking and lounging by the pool wasn't your jam. There's a whole jogging track that goes around the bottom of the ship. They had a huge spa area that had a bunch of treatments that you could get done or just get a massage as well as a huge fitness center. And on the topper level, they would have all of the different sports courts. So if you wanna play tennis or basketball, et cetera. There's also several different shopping options. Most of them seem to be catered toward like the higher end shoppers. But there was a kid's shop in the boardwalk and we ended up buying Elliot a little teddy bear. So that's our souvenir from the cruise. He's a little teddy bear. Now for the ports of call, there's actually like two different itineraries for the wonder of the seas. There's like an Eastern Caribbean and a Western Caribbean routes. And depending on what itinerary you have will depend on what countries that you visit and kind of like your exact itinerary. But we did the Eastern Caribbean. So we stopped off at St. Martin, St. Thomas and then Coco Cay, which is like Royal Caribbean's private island. We had pretty much whole days at each of the various port. You don't have like a ton of time if you wanna venture very far from the port, but luckily the islands are not all that big. However, though, you will need to take into account traffic. We definitely got stuck in traffic coming back from St. Thomas and St. Martin. I mean, think about it. You have like 7,000 passengers potentially getting off and getting on in a span of like a couple hours. Aside from Coco Cay, Coco Cay is the only one where it didn't really matter because it was an all walking island. So you just walked right off the ship, walked right on, didn't have to worry about, which was really nice. And it's a stunning island. I mean, like they know what's up. So we ended up not doing any of the pre-booked tours for the islands. We just got off the ship and grabbed a taxi or a shuttle that were right at the port to take us to this specific beach that we wanted to go. And it worked great. They've got it down pat. They know that there's a huge cruise ship coming. Like if you're just looking for a simple go into town or go into a beach stop at one of these islands, don't bother booking anything. But like if you did wanna do something a bit more complicated or if you wanted to pack like more activities into your day for those like port days, then I would really consider looking at one of the offered excursions or tours that they, and like pre-book that before you go because it's just like not worth the stress of trying to organize it and think you're gonna like miss the ship. I don't know, maybe that's just me. But we did do a space center tour at the end of our cruise. And this was one that we booked through Royal Caribbean. And this was, I thought, a really good value. Coach transportation to Kennedy Space Center, the tickets for the center, as well as coach transportation to the airport. And our bags were all locked up and secured on the bus. So that made a lot of sense for us. Actually was cheaper to go through the organized tour that Royal Caribbean offered than to do it on our own. So let's talk crowds. You know, being the largest cruise ship in the world, there's gonna be a lot of people on that boat. And for the majority of things, I actually feel like there wasn't that much waiting. I feel like they've like really hammered through the system. The biggest, biggest thing we had to wait for was the elevators. Even though there's 24 of them, it always felt like we were waiting for an elevator to go up, to go down. We ended up opting for the stairs a lot of times. Now this wasn't huge waits, but it still was a wait every single time we did the elevators. We did find that the front elevators were less busy than the ones in the stern. I think because that was like the main pool area, as well as that was where the Windjammer Buffet was. Another thing is that the pools during sea days were quite crowded. Like most of the seats were taken and it looked, you know, it was busy, but that's kind of to be expected. It's a sunny sea day. That's where everybody wants to be. Still, if you wanted to find a spot, you could find a spot. The buffets were also very packed most of the time. Like if you're going at like peak dining times, peak lunch times, the buffets were also very busy. But again, we always managed to get the seat. The thing we had to wait for the most was a high chair for Elliot. That was like the biggest thing. It was just trying to get a high chair organized for him. Embarkation as well as disembarkation, so getting on and off the ship were very smooth. And I felt like we just cruised through it. Like we didn't really have to wait long periods of time in any kind of lines. Now they do stagger these and I feel like they've got the system down pat. So the ship was big enough that even though there's like 7,000 guests plus like 2,000 staff members, like everybody is very spread out. So it didn't feel like it was super crowded and super busy. Some other general experiences I would say is you could feel the rocking quite a bit for such a large ship. And we've talked to other passengers on the ship that had been on various other cruises, smaller cruises, and they were also surprised at how much this ship rocked. Like I don't think you would need seasickness pills. I don't think you'd actually get physically sick because it's not like being on a sailboat or something like that. But you definitely need a little bit of sea legs. Another thing I was very pleasantly surprised with was the amount of staff members that were working on the ship and the service quality. Like anytime we needed something, we could always find somebody like right away. There was always people around and everyone was so friendly and awesome. And we just had a really pleasant experience. So the app that the Royal Caribbean gets you to download was everything. There is just like honestly spend some time and get used to using this app because there were maps on it so you can navigate to the various parts of the ship. You could plan your day. They had just endless entertainment options available. You made your reservations on it, etc. It's just it made the overwhelmingness of being on the largest cruise ship in the world. A lot more manageable. But frustratingly though, their free messaging service that that is part of their app wasn't working when we were there. And Matt and I were like really hoping to rely on that to be able to coordinate naps and like sleeping trade-offs with Elliot. So we ended up just like reverting to like notes on the door, which not a big deal. Another option is their internet packages. So they have like the Zoom satellite internet that you could buy for your time on the ship if you need it for work or something's happening back home. You've got that connection because cell service doesn't work in the middle of the ocean. Their internet packages are also very expensive. It's nice to just like disconnect and not have to worry about what the outside world is doing. So like that's our current take on our experience on the largest cruise ship in the world, which will stay the largest cruise ship in the world for about another year. And then there'll be an even bigger one. If you're interested in some of my best travel tips and hacks, make sure you watch this video here. And if you're a beginner traveler just getting started, then check out these right there.