The GENESIS ships will see another leap in cruise ship sizes

World's biggest cruise ships to homeport at Port Everglades
Deal could mean Port Everglades becomes the top US cruise ship port...


World's biggest cruise ships will homeport at Port Everglades, it has been announced.

The colossal giant Genesis project ships, being built by Aker at its Turku shipyard in Finland, will dwarf today's mega cruise ships and will be based year round at Port Everglades in a deal agreed by the vessel owners Royal Caribbean and Broward County.

The ships almost defy the imagination.

1180 feet long, a gross registered tonnage of a mind boggling 220,000 tons, 240 feet high, carrying 6,400 passengers.

For comparison, the current biggest cruise ship in service is the QUEEN MARY 2 which is a 'mere; 151,400 tons grt. Admittedly the actual dimensions of the Genesis ship terms of height, length and breadth are not appreciably that much bigger than QM2 (given the scale of the vessels to start with) but unlike the Cunard vessel, the Genesis ships will have more cabins and utilise the fullest length of the vessel, where QM2 has a much longer, more traditional length between bow and bridge.

It involves 500 designers alone on the development of the ships which Aker describe as giant 3 dimensional puzzles. Each vessel will be made up of 180 huge blocks of up to 600 tons apiece and design work involves over 30,000 drawings being produced.

The first vessel will be the most expensive ship ever ordered, with a price tag in the region of 1.2 billion USD.

It had previously been expected that Miami would be the port for the ships, but Port Everglades was approached by Royal Caribbean to discuss the prospect of one of the Genesis ships being homeported there, however, according to the US press, the port pressed for both ships. It is reported that renovations of the terminal to be used at the port will be paid for by surcharges made to passengers and that neither Port Everglades nor the taxpayer will be footing any of the bill.

Should the deal all go through at Royal Caribbean board level, as it is expected to, on the 18th December, then the Port Everglades director believes his port will eclipse Miami and Port Canaveral as the US top cruise port.