The world's largest cruise ship is said to look like a turtle

The cruise business is booming: according to Statista, the market sees around 30 million passengers a year. The comfortable travel model is most popular with Americans, followed by Germans and Brazilians - even though the huge pots are not exactly environmentally friendly.

So it's not surprising that there are always new ideas and concepts for very special cruise experiences. The Italian design studio Lazzarini from Rome probably thinks in particularly large dimensions. With the terayacht "Pangeos", chief designer Pierpaolo Lazzarini is planning what he claims to be the largest cruise ship in the world - and it looks like a swimming turtle. According to a report in the online magazine Autoevolution, he has been working on the designs since 2009.

The concept for the monstrous cruise ship provides for up to 60,000 people to be accommodated on board. Construction is expected to take around eight years and cost between five and eight billion US dollars. The offer is therefore primarily aimed at a wealthy audience with luxurious holiday dreams - but without water slides and common rooms.

In addition to a beach club, shopping center and various pools, there will be space for 19 villas and 69 apartments on the two side wings of the terayacht, i.e. the two front fins of the turtle. A water channel should offer opportunities for water sports such as stand-up paddling.

A total of 72 outdoor areas are planned, including a huge helipad on the top deck. With a diameter of 188 meters, the interior with a large pool and sunbathing area will be as large as the Colosseum in Rome.

The dimensions of the "Pangeos" are so gigantic that - if the animation in the design study is to be believed - vehicles are necessary in order to be able to comfortably traverse the entire ship. It would be a floating city in the truest sense of the word - but one that moves very slowly.

The turtle ship is supposed to reach a speed of just nine kilometers per hour. That might be on par with a turtle on land, but quite slow on the high seas. For comparison: an ordinary cruise ship reaches top speeds of up to around 40 kilometers per hour.

But according to the designer Lazzarini, that's not a big deal: After all, the floating city doesn't have a fixed travel destination, it's supposed to float leisurely across the world's oceans. This is made possible by a total of nine emission-free electric motors, each with 16,800 hp. Thanks to 30,000 small cells in the abdomen, the "Pangeos" is also said to be unsinkable.

As a tera-yacht, the “Pangeos” would be larger than a giga-yacht. The term refers to ships with a length of 80 meters or more. The Shell Oil Refinery Prelude currently holds the record for the largest floating object in the world. The Australian-flagged conveyor is 500 meters long and around 75 meters wide.

Incidentally, the largest cruise ship in the world to date is the “Wonder of the Seas” in the service of the shipping company Royal Caribbean International. It is 362 meters long and 66 meters wide. However: Lazzarini has so far left open whether there are already interested parties for the Giga project. If things go according to his plans, the “Pangeos” should be built in a shipyard in Saudi Arabia.

This suggests that the Italian is probably hoping for a client from the Arab world. Places like the future city of Neom in Saudi Arabia, which recently hit the headlines as the venue for the Arabian Winter Games, show that people there are at least open to such mammoth projects.

According to the report in Autoevolution magazine, however, the designer plans to make the Pangeos in Zuckerberg's Metaverse at least a virtual experience as early as the beginning of next year. Users can then purchase NFTs containing credentials to access virtual title deeds.

It will still be some time before the world's largest cruise ship in the shape of a turtle floats across the world's oceans. If the package holiday on board a cruise ship is not your thing, here are a few other travel tips: