Welcome to the Royal Grameen blog podcast, your weekly look into the world of Royal Crime

Cruising. I'm your host, Matt Hodgeberg, and this is episode number 473. Icon of the

Seas has been revealed, and this week we're talking to all icon of the seas. Here we go.

I have to apologize for the fact that this week's episode is late, but it was purposely done so

because I knew that Royal Crime is releasing the icon of the season information on Thursday, and I just didn't

want to do an episode as per usual on Wednesday and pretend that there wasn't something much

more interesting to talk about than whatever else I could have come up with besides that.

So I figured you would all be okay. If we delay this a couple days. You can listen to the podcast over the weekend.

We talk icon of the season.

There's a lot to unwrap, and this is going to be the subject of a lot of topics here for the next, gosh, 18 months or so.

I mean, we're not going to do every single episode on icon of the season, the podcast.

Sorry.

But certainly, it's going to be a recurring topic.

And with any new cruise ship, there is always a lot of excitement and intrigue and points of discussion because Royal Caribbean always takes the opportunity with new ships to introduce new concepts,

rework things, you know, there's a lot of innovation, even within existing ships, right, within the same class. Like, you know, when we saw a symphony, you know, there's a lot of innovation. Even within existing ships, right, within the same class, like, you know, when we saw

symphony and we saw Odyssey and we saw Wonder of the Seas, those were not the first

quantum or oasis class cruise ships, but there were a lot of changes on there.

But now you have icon of the seas, which is a brand new class.

This is the first new class of Royal Caribbean cruise ship since 2014. That is significant.

So if you're not that familiar with cruising, a ship class is kind of like a car model, right?

Like you've got like Ford Mustang or, I don't know if they still make the Ford Tourists,

but Ford Taurus or the, you know,

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