Royal Caribbean Cruises (RCL) officially launched the 'Icon of the Seas,' the largest cruise ship in the world, on Saturday January 27th, from Miami. The 20-deck ship can hold over 7,000 passengers, and weighs 248,663 gross tonnage.

Connor Cunningham, Melius Research Director, joins Yahoo Finance to discuss the ship's historic feats and what it means for the company going forward.

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Yahoo Finance Live.

Editor's note: This article was written by Nicholas Jacobino

Video Transcript

SEANA SMITH: You cover Royal Caribbean-- and I bring that up because there's lots of talk this morning about "Icon of the Seas," the largest cruise ship. I know you attended the launch event. My question to you, though, is this going to be the trick or the ticket here for cruise lines to get more people to board these cruises?

CONNOR CUNINGHAM: Yeah, so-- yeah, we did attend the "Icon of the Seas" event. It was quite something. Again, that ship is--

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SEANA SMITH: It looked like it.

CONNOR CUNINGHAM: --obviously very nice and huge. The one thing from our standpoint is that yeah, it's a really nichey industry at the end of the day. There's about 30 million people that travel on cruise ships. So they're all about not necessarily fighting with one another about the incremental traveler. It's about taking some demand away from land-based vacations.

When think about just the cruise line industry as a whole, historically, they used to be at a discount about 15% in terms of price versus a Disney Vacation or a Las Vegas vacation. You know, now, it's about 30% to 35%. So they got an opportunity to continue to price up going forward.

Ships like the "Icon of the Sea" should bring a lot of optionality for people. You attach that to a potential day at CocoCay, and that's a pretty nice vacation. And it hits a lot of the-- it checks a lot of the boxes that I think people want to go on. My kids loved it, so, it's obviously very family friendly type of vacation.

SEANA SMITH: Looks like there's a heck of a lot of activities on that ship. I think any kid would absolutely love being on that. All right, Connor Cunningham, great to have you. Thanks so much for joining us here this morning.

CONNOR CUNINGHAM: Thank you.