Taking the liberty

Cruise ships have something of an image problem. Saddled with the reputation, possibly unfairly, of being the holiday of choice for the elderly and lottery millionaires, the leisure industry's equivalent of an expensive night at the Bingo has struggled to shake off its fuddy-duddy image since its heyday in the 1970s.

One company doing its best to get younger generations and families to consider cruising as a holiday option is Royal Caribbean, which started life in Norway in 1968.

The Liberty of the Seas

The Liberty of the Seas is the second ship from the now Florida-based cruise giant's Freedom Class, joining its elder sibling, The Freedom of the Seas, as the word's largest passenger vessel. It has just started taking its first paying passengers on cruises that start from £330 for a seven-night excursion around the eastern Caribbean.

Not that guests will see much of Jamaica or the Cayman Islands; this £400m monster comes packed with enough on-board entertainment to keep even the most ardent 'landlubber' occupied.

The Liberty's 14 decks are packed with 12 bars, two nightclubs, a casino and shops. With ice rink, boxing ring, golf simulators and basketball court, the sporty are well-catered for too. Then there is the FlowRider machine that recreates a Californian surfing experience by churning out 30mph waves, a nine-hole miniature golf course, 50ft climbing wall and a water park replete with fountains and whirlpool baths.

However, this dedication to fulfilling every possible whim of the potential 4,360 passengers on board takes its toll on the engineers tasked with designing this floating city, said Harri Kulovaara, Royal Caribbean's executive vice-president of maritime.

'It is one of the most challenging engineering objects in the world,' he said. 'The ships are entirely non-standard and are built like prototypes, packed with complex engineering inside.'

The ship's 160,000 tonnes were cut and welded from several hundred thousand pieces of steel at the firm's shipyard in Finland while the Liberty's navigational, power and communication systems are all custom-made, non-standard systems that pull the very latest in technology together. Kulovaara claimed the ship's captain can control this giant ship using a joystick to within 10-15cm in space using GPS.

'The Liberty of the Seas is like combining a power station, a plane and a four-star hotel with a ship. It's extremely challenging but that's its charm really,' said Kulovaara.

According to Kulovaara, taking the record for the world's biggest passenger ship was never Royal Caribbean's ultimate goal. 'Building the biggest was never the sole purpose of the Freedom class but we just had so many ideas as to what we wanted on board that the ship's design just grew to accommodate this.'

One of the biggest challenges in the Liberty's design was having to deal with the sheer amount of water required to service not only the ship's washing, cooking and drinking needs but crucially all of the water-based entertainment activities. Surfing pools, waterparks and whirlpools all require huge volumes of water. This was one of the reasons for the ship's size, said Kulovaara.