By Kate Coli

It was the week of March 13 in Miami, Florida. Although the coronavirus was a concern at the time, my dad and I boarded Royal Caribbean cruise line’s Oasis of the Seas after a brief temperature scan and decided that the virus wouldn’t impose on our vacation. Oasis of the Seas was the largest passenger ship in the world when it was built, only to be topped by its sister, Symphony of the Seas. It was crowned best cruise ship by Viagem e Turismo Magazin in 2014 and has been rated as the fourth most-affordable ship in the world. Oasis can hold a staggering amount of 6,780 passengers (not including the 2000-plus crew members). The ship itself is more like a floating city than a cruise ship.

Upon boarding, we milled through thick crowds of people on the fifth floor, Royal Promenade, and boarded a packed elevator to get to our room. The Promenade serves as the primary floor of the ship. It houses restaurants and bars, along with in-house shops. No matter what time it was, there were always people lingering for a cup of coffee or late-night pizza. As we floated up, I peered through the glass panels on the front of the elevator, witnessing what I didn’t know would be the last group of people to board the ship for at least a year. 

Before COVID-19, cruise ships were already known by a large number of people to be hotspots for possible diseases. In a survey done by NBC News, 41% of people said that they either would go on a cruise or have been on one, while 47% said they would never be caught dead on one because of bacteria and the risk of getting sick. The remaining 12% were not sure how they felt about the situation. That 47% of the group has a good reason to avoid cruise ships, as NBC reports that “the CDC investigates an average of 12-13 gastrointestinal disease outbreaks on cruise ships each year.”

Oasis of The Seas docked at Labadee, Haiti.
Photo credit: Kate Coli.

Before arriving at our room, we wandered around the seventeen stacked floors that make up the ship. As we wandered around the decks, we passed by a scattering of restaurants, including everything from an American steakhouse called Chops to what would be our favorite pizza spot, Sorrentos. I stopped at Chops and peeked inside, since they were closed until dinner. Inside the tinted windows were a handful of employees wiping off every tangible surface in the room, clearly trying to sanitize the place for the large dinner crowds. Sounds of laughter escaped from the partially closed doors to the restaurants as the crew joked with one another, happy to be in each other’s presence. 

On the second day, the captain announced that the location we were headed to on the fourth day, Jamaica, was no longer accepting ships in their ports in fear of the virus. We instead were rerouted to a different port not too far away, Costa Maya, Mexico, which was packed with other ships that had encountered the same problem. 

The fourth day started out with an overflowing bowl of Froot Loops and a tall glass of water at Coastal Kitchen, a restaurant perched on the seventeenth floor of the ship. Our seats overlooked the trees on deck eight, Central Park, and the pool decks, where people were making their final runs to the towel stands before leaving the ship for the day to go into Costa Maya.

That night, we revisited Coastal Kitchen for dinner. Our waiter, Cornel, hailed from Romania. I had never seen so much diversity in one place until we boarded the ship. None of the crew members were from the United States, and almost every single one came from a different country. Royal Caribbean makes its employees’ country of origin just as important as their name, as they are printed right under the employee’s name on their nametags. Every crew member had a distinct personality and part of their culture to share. Each night, we had a different waiter or waitress, each one with a different story to tell about where they came from. That night my dad got into a deep conversation with Cornel about where he would go if COVID-19 shut the ship down. “I’m honestly not sure,” he said, his thick Romanian accent twisting the words as he spoke. He then explained that he could only imagine that he would travel back home to Romania to visit his family that he had not seen in six months. 

Oasis of the Seas lights up the night sky.
Picture credit: Kees Torn.

As the final hours of our cruise dawned, my dad and I went to Coastal Kitchen one last time to say goodbye to Cornel and our other favorite waiters. That morning, everyone on the ship received news that it would be the last sailing until the end of March. Couples that were planning on staying on the ship for another week looked more saddened by the fact that they were exiting the ship than the fact that a global pandemic was about to strike the country. 

No one on the ship had a sense of urgency or paranoia about the imminent virus at the time. The departing passengers from our ship were still lingering in the sense of paradise. It seemed like there was something in the air on the floating island that simply soothed everyone, regardless of what was going on outside the steel-reinforced walls. The moment we stepped outside into the departing terminal back in Miami, reality sank in. Families leaving other ships around us wove between the relaxed couples that just disembarked Oasis, frantically trying to find their taxies. Worried moms stripped Wet Wipes from their teal packaging and sanitized their children’s phones before they could text their friends about how excited they were that school would be out for a couple of weeks. As my dad and I hopped into our taxi and pulled away from Oasis, we didn’t realize that our trip would be the ship’s last sailing until 2021. 

We arrived home later that night, still reminiscing about the moments on Oasis that seemed like they existed in a different universe. It was later reported that day that there were at least fourteen cases of COVID-19 on the ship among crew members. The number of passengers that have contracted the disease has not been disclosed.

The week of March 13 is universally known as the week that everything changed. Many places, like schools and workplaces, were soon to be uninhabited for extensive periods of time. The constant bustle became absent from the spacious buildings and structures.

The last group of people to be on Oasis of the Seas are some of the last for a long period of time to know what a true cruise experience is like. It isn’t just gorging on food all day or sitting in the sun for hours on end. A true experience is made up of close conversations with crew members from different corners of the world and meeting new people in line to get pizza at twelve at night. With the tight quarters of a large ship like Oasis, it is hard to tell when anyone will be able to have a real experience like that again, if at all.