Regal Princess

Regal Princess is the second ship of the Royal class, the hull form Princess built six times between 2013 and 2022 before moving on to the LNG-powered Sphere class. She is not the first of the class and not the last, and the thing that actually distinguishes her is not architectural: she is the ship where Princess switched the whole company over to a wearable.

What the Royal class changed

The Grand class had carried Princess since 1998, Grand Princess, Caribbean Princess, Ruby, Emerald and the rest, all variations on one 1990s hull. The Royal class was the replacement, about thirty thousand tons larger, with the Piazza reworked into a three-deck atrium that the ship’s circulation is built around rather than a lobby you pass through. Eighty-one percent of the staterooms have balconies.

The visible flourish is the SeaWalk: a sixty-foot walkway with a glass floor cantilevered out over the side of the ship on deck sixteen, roughly 128 feet above the water. It is a gimmick and it is also genuinely unnerving, which is the point. Royal Princess got one first; Regal has the same installation.

The medallion started here

On November 13, 2017, Regal Princess sailed as the first MedallionClass ship. The OceanMedallion is a quarter-sized disc you carry in a pocket or wear on a strap; it unlocks your stateroom as you walk up to the door, pays for things, and lets the crew deliver a drink to wherever you happen to be sitting rather than to a table number. Royal Princess and Caribbean Princess followed in early 2018, and the system is now fleetwide.

Nine years on it is no longer a novelty, but the reason it matters on this particular ship is that she was built around the retrofit before anyone else was. The wiring, the readers and the door hardware are older than the software running on them, and Princess has kept updating the latter.

Her most recent yard visit was April 2025 at Damen Shiprepair in Rotterdam: generator work, hull cleaning and paint, new corridor carpet, and refreshed furniture in the International Café and one of the dining rooms. It was maintenance, not a reinvention. She had a heavier refit in March 2022 at Vigor in Portland, Oregon, which did the elevators, lobbies, cabins and pool areas.

Where she sails

Two hemispheres of work, and the Caribbean is the larger half. She runs the bulk of her calendar out of Fort Lauderdale and Miami on eastern, western and southern Caribbean itineraries, with a handful of longer runs; the schedule stretches from six nights to sixty-four, and the median sailing is twelve nights, which is longer than most big ships in that market sell.

In the northern summer she crosses to Europe and works from Copenhagen and Southampton, on Baltic and Norway itineraries and British Isles loops, with a few Canada and New England sailings tacked on around the repositioning. The crossings themselves are sold as voyages in their own right, which is where the very long itineraries in her schedule come from.

Who she suits

People who want a large modern ship without a waterpark on the roof. She is recognizably a Princess ship (the Piazza, Movies Under the Stars, the Sanctuary aft, a proper theater rather than an acrobatics venue) at a scale that supports a real number of restaurants and bars without turning into a resort with a bow. The long Caribbean itineraries suit anyone who finds a seven-night week too short.

She does not suit anyone chasing the newest thing. She is twelve years old, her last two yard periods were maintenance rather than reinvention, and if you have sailed Sun Princess you will notice that this is the previous generation of Princess ship: no glass dome, no three-story stern dining room. Nor does she suit travelers who want small and quiet; 3,560 guests at double occupancy fill a pool deck on a Caribbean sea day, and they do.