Discovery Princess

Discovery Princess is the sixth and last of the Royal class. Fincantieri handed her over at Monfalcone on January 28, 2022, nine years after Royal Princess started the series, and by the time she sailed Princess had already committed to the larger LNG-powered Sphere class. That makes her a specific kind of ship: the final, most worked-out version of a design nobody is going to build again.

What nine years of iteration produced

She is not a redesign of her sisters. Same 1,083-foot hull, same 38.4-meter beam, same three-deck Piazza, same 1,830 staterooms. What changed across the class was cumulative and mostly invisible from the dock, tonnage crept up from 142,714 on Regal Princess to 145,000 here, and the lower-berth count from 3,560 to 3,660, because the later hulls carry an extra part-deck of cabins aft.

The one change you can point at is at the very top. The Sky Suites sit above the bridge with balconies wrapping roughly 270 degrees, and Discovery has the last version of them. They are among the largest balconies in the Princess fleet, and they look forward over the bow, which on a Glacier Bay morning is the single best-placed piece of real estate on the ship.

She has been MedallionClass from delivery rather than by retrofit, which is a minor but real difference from the older ships in the fleet: the wearable was designed into her rather than fitted around her.

Where she actually sails

She is a West Coast ship and she barely leaves the Pacific.

The larger half of her calendar is Alaska, and it is the good version of it. Rather than round trips from Seattle, she runs the Gulf of Alaska one-way between Whittier, the port serving Anchorage, and Vancouver: seven nights each direction, or fourteen as a round trip. The one-way format is what gets you College Fjord and Hubbard Glacier as well as the Inside Passage, and it is why the season fills.

The rest of the year she works out of Los Angeles on Mexican Riviera runs, mostly seven nights to Cabo San Lucas, Mazatlán and Puerto Vallarta, with some shorter five-night versions and occasional two-week itineraries down the coast. A handful of Pacific Northwest sailings fill the shoulder weeks between seasons. The median sailing on her whole schedule is seven nights.

Who she suits

Anyone booking Alaska who wants a new ship for it. That combination is rarer than it sounds; the Alaska trade has historically been where cruise lines park their older hulls, and Discovery is four years old with balconies on four fifths of her cabins, which matters more in Alaska than anywhere else because the scenery is on both sides and it does not stop.

She suits families on the Mexico runs, too; Camp Discovery is well set up and seven nights out of Los Angeles is an easy drive for a lot of people.

She does not suit anyone who wants to be somewhere warm on a sea day in September; her top deck is open, not domed, and that is the concrete advantage Sun Princess has over her in this exact deployment. She does not suit anyone who wants a small ship in Alaska: at 3,660 guests she is going to be tendering alongside other large ships in Ketchikan and Juneau, and the ports feel it. And she does not suit anyone looking for a fundamentally different experience from her sisters. If you have sailed Enchanted or Sky Princess, you have sailed this ship. What is different here is the itinerary, not the vessel.