Norwegian Sun

Norwegian Sun is the sister ship that was built properly. Norwegian Sky started as an abandoned Costa hull that Norwegian bought at a third finished; Sun was ordered outright and built end to end at Lloyd Werft in Bremerhaven, delivered in 2001 to the design Sky had been retrofitted toward rather than the one she started from. At 78,309 gross tons on the same 848-foot hull she is marginally the larger of the two, and she carries fewer people, 968 staterooms for 1,936 guests, against her sister’s 1,002 and 2,004. Nine passenger decks of twelve. Nine hundred and six crew.

The 2018 refit, and what it did not touch

She was the ship Norwegian used to start the Norwegian Edge program, the four-hundred-million-dollar fleetwide upgrade that later did Sky, Dawn, Jade and the rest. Three weeks bow to stern: refreshed staterooms and public rooms, the main pool, the casino, and three new venues, Los Lobos Cantina, the Bliss Ultra Lounge and the Spinnaker Lounge. Cagney’s, Le Bistro, Il Adagio and the Moderno churrascaria were already aboard; the Stardust Theatre seats a thousand.

None of that changes the bones. Twenty-five years old, twelve decks, two pools, five whirlpools, and a passenger count that would fit twice over inside Norwegian Prima. The virtue of a ship this size is not the attraction list. It is that she gets into ports the big hulls cannot use at all, which is precisely what her 2027 schedule is built around.

In June 2022 she hit a growler, a small chunk of glacial ice, near the Hubbard Glacier in Alaska. Inspection found real damage and she spent more than a fortnight under repair. It is the one incident on her record worth knowing about.

Where she actually sails

Fifty-eight sailings, a little over a year of them, and they fall into four distinct blocks with two ocean crossings joining them up.

Baltic, late summer 2026. Seven- and nine-night runs between Copenhagen and Helsinki, three in each direction, calling at Stockholm, Tallinn, Warnemünde for Berlin, Riga, Gdynia, Klaipėda and Kiel. A tenth night takes her from Helsinki to Southampton in the autumn to finish the season.

Two crossings and a coastal run, autumn 2026. Southampton to New York in twelve nights, then New York down to Miami in thirteen by way of Bermuda, Aruba and the Bahamas.

Panama Canal, winter 2026 into spring 2027. Fourteen round-trips out of Miami, eleven or twelve nights each, and every one of them is a partial transit: Colón, Gatun Lake, and back out the way she came, with Puerto Limón in Costa Rica and Cartagena in Colombia on nearly all of them. Beyond that core the weeks vary, Harvest Caye, Grand Cayman and Cozumel on some, Falmouth and Great Stirrup Cay on others, Aruba, Curaçao and the Dominican Republic on a handful. She crosses back east on April 16, 2027, Miami to Rome in sixteen nights.

The Adriatic, summer 2027. This is the bulk of her, and it is the reason to look at her at all. Thirty-three seven-night sailings between Rome and Ravenna run from May through August, eighteen from Rome to Ravenna, thirteen back the other way, and two that leave Ravenna and finish in Athens instead. The port list is short, repetitive and excellent: Kotor and Corfu on every single one, Salerno on all but two, then Split, Koper, Catania, Zadar, Messina and Dubrovnik. Norwegian sells these as port-intensive weeks with no sea days, and the call counts bear that out: seven nights, six or seven stops.

Be clear on one piece of vocabulary. The database, following Norwegian, files the eastern end of that run as “Venice (Ravenna).” Ravenna is a working port about ninety miles south of Venice, and getting between the two is a transfer of roughly two hours. Nine of these weeks are sold as a Rome and Ravenna cruisetour and six more as a Venice cruisetour, which is where the land nights come from.

Then she stops. The last departure in the database is September 5, 2027, from Athens to Dubai, twenty-one nights, filed under Africa because it runs the length of the Mediterranean and through Suez. That is not a cruise Norwegian built for its own sake; it is the delivery voyage. The line announced in April 2025 that both Sun-class ships go on long-term charter to Cordelia Cruises; Sky left in September 2026 and Sun follows in late 2027, to be renamed Cordelia Sun and put to work on Indian itineraries.

Who she suits

Anyone who wants the Adriatic done properly. Kotor, Split, Dubrovnik, Zadar, Koper and Corfu on a 1,936-guest ship is a materially different experience from the same ports on a 4,000-guest one: smaller tender queues where tendering happens, shorter waits to get ashore, and berths in town rather than at an industrial quay a bus ride out. Seven nights with six or seven calls is a lot of Croatia for the money, and the money on this ship is not much.

She also suits Panama Canal travelers who would rather not pay Oceania prices for a partial transit, and Baltic travelers who want Riga and Klaipėda rather than only the obvious four capitals.

She does not suit families wanting the current Norwegian product. There is no water park, no go-kart track, no ropes course; there are two pools and a theater. She does not suit anyone who dislikes a busy port schedule; the 2027 Mediterranean weeks give you almost nowhere to hide and almost no day at sea to recover in. Anyone who wants to sail her should also note that she is on a countdown: the schedule runs out in September 2027 and does not resume, and the last real money spent on her interiors was in 2018.