Symphony of the Seas in Nassau
I was last on Royal Caribbean’s Symphony of the Seas when cruise ships first started sailing again right after covid. At that time there were far less passengers onboard than what the ship can actually carry. Not so much this time around as the ship was pretty full.
pool and waterslides
Symphony of the Seas launched in 2018, the fourth of 6 Oasis class ships. It was preceeded by the Oasis, Allure, and Harmony, and followed by Wonder and Utopia with a 7th ship of this class due to launch in 2028. It was the biggest cruise ship in the world when it was new, but now Wonder, Utopia, Icon, and Star of the Seas are all bigger. Royal’s newest ships Icon, Star, and Utopia run on LNG (liquid natural gas) which is a cleaner fuel than the bunker fuel and marine diesel older ships use.
entrance to the ultimate abyss dry slide
Symphony of the Seas can carry over 6000 passengers and more than 2000 crew. It has 18 decks of which 16 are accessible to passengers. Tonnage is 230,000 and length 1,188 feet. Its maximum width is 215.5 feet. It has 2759 passenger cabins, some of which hold more than 2 guests including some that can hold up to 6.
top of the ultimate abyss 10-deck dry slide
Being such a big ship it does have a lot of places to go. More of them were open at the same time with the larger number of passengers so the ship didn’t feel as crowded as it actually was, though it was definitely noticeable that more people were onboard. This was most obvious when doing things like looking for a vacant table in the buffet, especially when you need one that seats 5 people.
Carousel
Symphony of the Seas has all the standard things people expect on any cruise ship like hot tubs. pools, kid’s clubs, shops, a casino, scheduled activities, and a whole lot of food and bars. It also has a lot more. It doesn’t stop at just things like waterslides and mini golf, though it does have those. It also has rock climbing walls, a zipline, a carousel, flow riders, 10-deck dry slides, and an ice-skating arena.
piano stairs
There’s also some piano stairs. Every stair worked the last time I was on Symphony, but this time a few of them stayed quiet. They aren’t actual piano keys, just designed to look that way. They have sensors that light up and play musical tones when people walk on them. If you are the only one on the stairway you can make the music play faster or slower by your speed on the stairs.
ducks in the duck machine at the arcade
The arcade has a duck machine where everyone wins a duck on every turn, but it costs $2.00 for each try so it didn’t get nearly as much business as the cheaper duck machines in the arcade on Carnival ships. These were different ducks than Carnival had with more variety. These all had the Royal Caribbean logo so they are nice ducks, just a bit pricey.
the outside promenade deck is a track
The inside promenade deck area is full of shops, bars, and eateries, but Symphony also has a promenade deck that runs all the way around the outside of the ship. This ship class has the best outside promenade decks ever because besides going all the way around they are set up as an actual track with a walking lane and a running lane.
promenade on Symphony of the Seas
Signs in the cabin bathrooms are a bit hypocritical saying to reuse towels to save the waves while the giftshop only sells chemical sunscreens that do serious damage to coral reefs if worn in the water. I haven’t seen a cruise ship yet that sold reef-safe mineral sunscreen. So far I’ve only seen one port shop that had any somewhere other than in Hawaii where all of the sunscreen we saw for sale was reef safe. Anyone cruising to the Caribbean or anywhere else that has coral can do their part to help by bringing their own reef-safe sunscreen. It’s a real shame the cruise industry doesn’t both provide it and educate people about the damage caused by chemical sunscreens considering the thousands of people they bring to areas with reefs daily while coral and the life it supports struggles worldwide.
Bionic Bar
It would be pretty hard to go hungry or thirsty on Symphony of the Seas with over 20 eateries and bars pretty much everywhere. It has a couple unique bars on the promenade, one being the Bionic Bar where robot arms mix the drinks and the other the Rising Tide Bar, which sits in a sort of half eggshell shaped elevator that is sometimes located in the promenade on deck 5 and at other times is accessed from the garden area called Central Park on deck 8.
Central Park
Central Park is an open area within the interior of the ship that has gardens with real live plants in the center and shops, eateries and a bar around the edges. Inside cabins on decks above Central Park have balconies overlooking the park so on this ship you can book an inside cabin and still have a balcony. We had one of those on Wonder of the Seas and liked it quite a lot.
highwire at the Hiro show
There is also an open area starting from deck 6 at the back of the ship called the Boardwalk. It has shops, eateries, an arcade, and a pub and sports bar on the outer edges. There are rooms with balconies overlooking this area as well. In the center there’s the carousel, the landing for the dry slides, and at the back the aquatheater. The aquatheater is the home for Hiro, a quite impressive water-based show that includes divers, dancers, an aerialist, high wire, and more. The ship also has a regular theater for production shows, but that’s not all.
ice show
In addition to having a couple of open skating sessions during our cruise where passengers could skate in the ice arena, it also is the theater for an ice show. Besides all the fancy skating the show also has a bit with a flock of lighted drones – which have to be tuned into the ship itself because they can’t do precision flying in a moving ship on normal GPS. The ice arena was also sometimes used for laser tag. There is definitely no shortage of things to do on Symphony of the Seas.
balconies on inside cabins with views of Central Park
A new addition since my last time on the ship is a small smoke-free casino. It’s unfortunate they didn’t trade places with the smoking and non-smoking casinos. The smoke-free one has just one entrance with double sets of doors so it would be easy to keep smoke contained within that one room. The smoking casino is open to other areas of the ship and you have to go to other decks to avoid walking through it to get from one side of the deck it is on to the other. Smoke from it drifts into the nearby dining room on deck 4 and sometimes up to other decks and into other areas of the ship as well.
solarium
There’s an adults only solarium at the front of the ship with a bar, hot tubs, and lots of deck chairs to relax in. The glass panels don’t fully enclose it though. They run in strips with open areas in between. It’s fine on hot days, but not so much when the weather is cold or rainy as it was for much of this trip.
one of the nicer stairway pictures
Like all cruise ships everywhere there is some pretty strange art to be found around the ship. Odd art seems to be a requirement on cruise ships. There is also some nice art, but that is harder to find.
gummy bandaids were not the only strange candy in the candy shop
Royal Caribbean is surprisingly good with getting people onto and off of the ship. With so many people onboard it would seem like the lines to get on and off in ports would be horrendous, but they never are. I’ve seen much longer lines on way smaller ships.
flowrider
Overall it’s a fun ship to sail on. Our granddaughter Hannah said that was her best cruise ever because of all the different things available to do. Symphony sailed out of Miami on this cruise, after which we had another leaving the same day out of Fort Lauderdale. In the past it has always been easy to do back-to-back cruises between the two ports. This time there wasn’t an Uber to be found and the taxi line was extremely long due to a lack of available taxis. We got lucky that one of the airport shuttle drivers was willing to drop us off at the cruise port in Fort Lauderdale after dropping other people at the airport there. The shuttle driver said there used to be a lot more Ubers in Miami, but a lot of the drivers got deported. Same with taxi drivers. The majority of both usually come from other countries.
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