Enchanted Princess

Enchanted Princess is the fifth Royal-class ship, and she has the strangest first chapter of the six. Fincantieri delivered her on September 30, 2020, into an industry that had stopped. She was finished, crewed, provisioned and worthless: there was nowhere to send her. She did not carry a paying passenger until November 10, 2021, more than a year after her handover, when she finally sailed from Port Everglades.

A ship with fourteen months of nothing on her record

The delay is not a footnote about scheduling. A cruise ship laid up is a ship being maintained by a skeleton crew (engines turned over, hull growth managed, systems exercised), and the fittings age without anyone using them. When she finally entered service she was technically a year-old ship and functionally a brand-new one, and her first real yard period came only seventeen months later.

That drydock, at Palermo from March 30 to April 15, 2023, is what actually differentiates her from her sisters. It added The Catch by Rudi, the seafood restaurant Princess built with Rudi Sodamin, moved Sabatini’s, and reworked several public rooms. Enchanted was among the first ships in the fleet to get it.

The other thing that is hers rather than the class’s sits at the top of the ship: two Sky Suites above the bridge, each with a balcony of roughly 700 square feet, the largest in the Princess fleet, looking forward over the bow and down onto the Movies Under the Stars screen. There are two of them on a ship carrying 3,660 guests, so this is a fact about the ship rather than a realistic plan for your vacation.

Everything else is Royal class as her sisters have it: the three-deck Piazza, the Sanctuary aft, 1,830 staterooms with balconies on about eighty percent of them, MedallionClass throughout.

Where she sails

She is a Mediterranean ship, and overwhelmingly so; the great bulk of her schedule is European.

Her homeports are Civitavecchia for Rome, Trieste at the head of the Adriatic, and Piraeus for Athens, which between them cover the two standard Mediterranean products: the western loop through Italy, France and Spain, and the eastern one through the Greek islands, the Adriatic and Turkey. Sailings run five to fifteen nights for the most part, with a median of fourteen, longer than the Mediterranean norm, and long enough that the itineraries reach past the obvious ports.

In the northern winter she crosses to Fort Lauderdale for a short Caribbean season, and the transatlantic repositionings in each direction are sold as voyages themselves. Those, strung together with a European segment, are where the forty-six-night sailings in her schedule come from.

Who she suits

People doing the Mediterranean who want the ship to be comfortable rather than the attraction. Two weeks around the Adriatic on a modern hull with a balcony, a real theater and enough restaurants that you are not eating the same room every night is a well-judged product, and the longer median itinerary means fewer days where you are one of six ships in a small harbor.

She suits repeat Princess passengers who want the current fleet standard without the crowds and the price of a brand-new Sphere-class hull.

She does not suit anyone who wants a warm ship in a cool climate; she has no enclosed top deck, which is the one place Sun Princess is plainly better. She does not suit anyone hoping for a materially different ship from Sky or Discovery Princess; the honest answer is that beyond The Catch and the deployment, they are the same vessel. And a fourteen-night Mediterranean itinerary is a lot of port days in a row; if you want to lie by a pool for a week, this is the wrong sailing on the right ship.