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Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money

Slicing huge cruise ships in half, then welding in an extra segment to lengthen them, is more or less a license to print money for cruise operators – so this 'jumboization' surgery is becoming very common. Let's take a look at how it's done.

That's not to mention the opportunity for a new paint job, bigger deck pools or engine upgrades while the ship's up on blocks – and HR only needs to train a small percentage of extra staff to add to an existing crew. Indeed, the term itself appears to have been coined just after World War II, at which point shipbuilders were already doing it at enormous scale to lengthen warships, in some of the most complex engineering work ever attempted in the slide rule era. Sometimes, as in the video below of the MSC Armonia, these open sections are actually christened and launched into the water in their own right, and towed to the dry dock where the surgery is scheduled, like floating apartment blocks.

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