Launching ships, especially huge luxury cruise ships, can be a tricky business. Preferably, you would want calm conditions, some sunshine, perhaps, to show off your gleaming new ocean-goer. You do not, as a rule, choose to launch it into a storm.

Yet Adam Goldstein is doing just that. No matter that the world is mired in recession or, at best, gingerly emerging from it, the president and chief executive of Royal Caribbean International is about to crack the champagne on the world’s largest cruise ship in the teeth of a global economic tempest.

The Oasis of the Seas is no ordinary cruise ship. At more than 220,000 tonnes, nearly a quarter of a mile long, 65 metres high — above the water line — she is said to be 40 per cent, perhaps 50 per cent, bigger than any other liner afloat, bigger, indeed, than any ever built.

She may also be the shot in the arm that the industry has been looking for. The credit crunch has squeezed the sector severely as would-be passengers have stayed on dry land and searched for cheaper holiday alternatives to a week lounging on a sundeck, cocktail in hand, gazing at the Caribbean.

As Mr Goldstein admitted: “The downturn has been very painful. We haven’t been seeing the profits to which we aspire. It has been a very challenging time for us and we’ve needed to discount our pricing, leading to a 13 per cent year-on-year decline in revenue yields, the most significant decline we have experienced as a company.

“But Oasis of the Seas is a good-news story for us. She has been 5½ years in the making and is built to last 30 or 40 years, so she’s going to have to survive a few economic cycles. Though hopefully there won’t be another one like this.”

Oasis of the Seas is not the industry’s sole hope of a return to the good old days. Last week, for example, cruise companies banded together to launch National Cruise Week, an attempt to lure veteran cruise-goers back to the waters with special offers such as on-board credit and cabin upgrades. But if revenues are to bounce back to the heady days before the recession, the cruise marketers will have to look beyond the silver-haired and attract a younger crowd.

“Though that stereotype persists, we’ve defied it for years,” Mr Goldstein, 49, said. “The average age of our passengers is 42 or 43, and now that I’m on the senior side of that dividing line, I’m hardly going to refer to it as a mature group. People who already knew the value of the cruise experience are coming back and we believe we’re pulling some new people into the sector.” Attracted, presumably, by facilities such as rock-climbing walls, surf simulators and an enormous outdoor “Central Park” and boardwalk, which will form part of the Oasis of the Seas.

The recession has presented Royal Caribbean, the world’s second-largest cruise operator, with a dilemma, a choice between price and occupancy. “We would love to have been able to charge higher prices,” Mr Goldstein said, “but we need to discount our pricing to keep the ships full. The on-board revenue spend of the guests is beneficial to the shareholders, so it’s better to have guests on board. The ambience of the ship is more positive for the guests if the ship is full and the energy level is higher and the activities come off better.

“And when the ship is full, the percentage of our on-board workforce who primarily earn their living from gratuities is happier.”

Oasis of the Seas has cost more than £800 million to build at its shipyard in Turku, Finland, under the watchful eye of Kai Levander, a Finnish naval architect and the designer of what was originally called Project Genesis. There are further costs, too, preparing ports around the Caribbean to receive her. Harbours in Jamaica, Mexico and the US Virgin Islands will be among those to be revamped and reinforced in time for the first of Oasis’s seven-night cruises in two months’ time.

Mr Goldstein had never set foot on a cruise ship before dipping his toes in the industry 23 years ago. In the early 1980s, he was a lawyer in New York with only one career goal: to be the client. Any client. A graduate of both Princeton and Harvard and with an MBA from the INSEAD school of business in Fontainbleau, he switched careers in 1986 and joined Gotaas-Larsen Shipping Corporation in London. In 1988, he moved to Royal Caribbean in Miami. Today, he finds himself virtually living on-board for weeks at a time as new ships are developed.

In the mid-1990s, a new generation of cruise ships went post-Panamax — becoming too wide for the Panama Canal — meaning that a ship’s dimensions now were bound only by the ambition of the shipbuilders. Mr Goldstein insists that the creation of Oasis and her sister Allure of the Seas. which will follow in her wake next year, was inspired by more than just a desire to break records but rather a curiosity to see just how much could be crammed between the bow and the stern of a modern cruise ship. The prospect of outdoor aquatheatres and al fresco dining prompts very British questions about what happens when it rains, to which Mr Goldstein simply responds: “It if it rains, you go inside.” The ship will be cruising the Caribbean rather than the North Sea, of course, where cold, miserable rain is less of an issue.

If the cruise industry has reflected the fates of other sectors hit by the downturn, its future course seems similar, too. It is testing the waters in China to assess the opportunities of an as yet untapped emerging — and immense — market.

“We are trying to build momentum in China at the moment, it is a potentially vast market that is in its absolute infancy,” Mr Goldstein said. “We have opened offices in China and have our own people on the ground. It’s not much compared to the maturity of the UK market here, but we’ve had wonderful support from emerging markets, which makes us very optimistic about the business.”

There will, you can be assured, be plenty of room on board for all those ready to relax on a Caribbean cruise.

Sailing by numbers

• About 1.5 million Britons take cruises every year, while 16 million book package holidays Oasis of the Seas will sail with about 5,400 passengers and more than 2,000 staff from around 50 countries. Mr Goldstein described it as “like the UN, except it works”

The on-board aquatheatre has a stage that measures 6,000 sq ft

The ship has a 610m running track, over 50 per cent longer than an Olympic-size track

There is a zip-wire, allowing passengers to shoot along a line suspended nine storeys above the boardwalk below

Royal Caribbean International’s share price fell from $54 a year ago to $6 in February. Last week they were trading at about $24 Royal Caribbean employs about 30,000 staff who work on the water and shoreside at ports around the world

The company has recorded two consecutive quarters of loss in 2009, but the group has a turnover of £4 billion

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