Cruisy

Evid­ently, spend­ing four­teen nights on board a lux­uri­ous float­ing hotel can be a little dis­or­i­ent­at­ing so every night at mid­night a crew mem­ber goes around all the elev­at­ors on the ship and swaps out a little plaque on the floor with the cor­rect day of the week. This is one of sev­er­al fairly astound­ing facts this cor­res­pond­ent learned on a tour aboard the Ova­tion of the Seas on its first ever port of call in New Zea­l­and, just before Christ­mas.

The Ova­tion is a very big deal indeed – the fourth biggest cruise liner in the world and the biggest to oper­ate in the South­ern Hemi­sphere and there­fore the biggest thing to hit Wel­ling­ton in a long while. Roy­al Carib­bean pulled out quite a few stops to show gobsmacked loc­al media around although their powers of per­sua­sion did not extend to the grim Wel­ling­ton sum­mer weath­er which offered an altern­at­ing diet of freez­ing rain and howl­ing gales.

Still, we were inside most of the time and well pro­tec­ted from the ele­ments but we could see that the large out­door pool was prob­ably not going to get the amount of atten­tion it would usu­ally receive. Des­pite that, the crew gamely sol­diered on put­ting up the vol­ley­ball nets for a match that would prob­ably struggle to raise one team.

Ova­tion of the Seas was built primar­ily for the Asi­an mar­ket and spends half the year based out of Hong Kong, com­ing south for their off-sea­son. A ded­ic­ated satel­lite uplink provides inter­net access for guests and crew (evid­ently the fast­est on any ship in the world) but a glitch in the mat­rix means all your Ins­tagram pho­tos are tagged as Kowloon. Or so we were told.

If cruise ships were a coun­try they would be the third biggest hol­i­day des­tin­a­tion the world – and the num­bers keep grow­ing, hence Roy­al Carib­bean’s bil­lion dol­lar invest­ment in each ship. The pas­sen­ger arrivals to Wel­ling­ton each year con­trib­ute a huge amount to the loc­al tour­ism eco­nomy with Ova­tion’s three single day vis­its this sea­son adding an estim­ated $1.5m to loc­al busi­nesses. Centre­Port has done an amaz­ing job of being able to host these vis­its at all after the Kaikoura earth­quake knocked so much of that part of the city out of action but the arrivals hall is cor­doned off for the fore­see­able future and the first that guests see of Wel­ling­ton is now con­ver­ted ship­ping con­tain­ers and mar­quee tents.

Ova­tion of the Seas returns to Wel­ling­ton on 4 Janu­ary 2017. Pho­to­graphs by Sebasti­an Macaulay.