Norwegian Spirit

Norwegian Spirit was not built for Norwegian. She was delivered by Meyer Werft at Papenburg in September 1998 as SuperStar Leo, the first of Star Cruises’ Leo class, and she was designed for a business that barely existed in the West at the time: short cruises out of Singapore sold to Asian passengers. Star Cruises bought Norwegian in 2000. In 2004 it moved the ship across to the American brand after roughly two weeks of work: new name, new funnel, and not much else. Making her an NCL ship in any real sense took another sixteen years.

What Star Cruises built

Her keel went down in October 1996, she was launched in July 1998, and Meyer Werft handed her over a week ahead of schedule that September. She spent her first year running two- to five-night cruises from Singapore to Malaysia and Thailand, then relocated to Hong Kong in September 1999 for one- to five-night runs to China, Hainan and Vietnam.

That origin still shows in the hull. She is 879 feet long on a 105-foot beam (Panamax width, narrow by modern standards), and 75,904 gross tons across thirteen decks, of which ten are open to guests. She carries about two thousand people at double occupancy, which on a ship this size is a generous ratio and one of the better arguments for sailing her. Her sister SuperStar Virgo followed in 1999 and has since passed through four names under other owners. Spirit is the only Leo-class hull still flying Norwegian’s flag.

The forty days in Marseille

She went into Chantier Naval de Marseille on January 2, 2020, and came out on February 10. The bill was over $100 million and the work was closer to a rebuild than a refresh. Fourteen venues were new: a second main dining room called Taste, the 24-hour Local Bar and Grill, the Garden Café buffet, the Great Outdoors Bar, Waves Pool Bar, Bliss Ultra Lounge, a rebuilt Spinnaker Lounge with a Humidor cigar room, and Onda by Scarpetta, the line’s modern Italian restaurant. The Mandara Spa roughly doubled to nearly seven thousand square feet with a thermal suite, heated loungers, sauna, steam room and a plunge circuit. Staterooms were redone. The hull got new artwork.

The most telling change was a subtraction. The children’s water park on the top deck was taken out and the space became Spice H2O, an adults-only sun deck with two hot tubs. That single swap is the clearest statement of what Norwegian decided this ship was for.

The refit had unfortunate timing. She emerged in February 2020 into a season that lasted a few weeks before the industry stopped entirely, so a large part of her working life since the money was spent has been elsewhere, including a charter season sailing out of Taiwan.

One thing the rebuild did not add is The Haven. Spirit has no ship-within-a-ship complex, no keycard-only sun deck, no butler-served enclave. The best cabins aboard are two Owner’s Suites with a balcony on each side and eight penthouses, and they are simply large cabins on a ship where everyone uses the same pool. Whether that is a loss depends entirely on what you were planning to book.

Where she actually sails

The Pacific, on long legs, with the homeport changing as she goes. Her program runs from Sydney, Papeete, Lautoka and Honolulu, and it is built around open-jaw voyages rather than round trips, Papeete to Lautoka, Fiji and Vanuatu across to Brisbane and Sydney, Honolulu out to the islands. Sailings run from four to twenty nights and the median is twelve, which is a long cruise by the standards of the rest of the fleet. Australia and Hawaii carry most of the calendar, with the South Pacific close behind and a single Alaska sailing that is a repositioning rather than a season. She is scheduled this way into 2028.

This is a deliberate use of a mid-sized ship. She is small enough for Dravuni Island and the Cook Islands and large enough to cross open ocean comfortably, and Norwegian has stopped trying to sell her as anything else.

Who she suits

Adults with time. The typical booking here is a twelve-night crossing of empty water to islands that most of the fleet never sees, and the people it works for are the ones who wanted exactly that. The 2020 money went into restaurants, bars and a spa rather than attractions, and the ratio of guests to space is better than almost anything else Norwegian runs.

She does not suit families with young children; the water park is gone and the itineraries are long. She does not suit anyone who wants The Haven, because there isn’t one. And she does not suit anyone who cares about sailing a new ship: the interiors are from 2020, but the layout you walk around is a 1998 design drawn for a different ocean.