Royal Princess

For fifteen years every new Princess ship was a variation on the Grand-class hull. Royal Princess ended that. Fincantieri cut her steel at Monfalcone in 2011, floated her out in August 2012, and Catherine, Princess of Wales christened her at Southampton in June 2013, the first genuinely new Princess design since 1998, and the template for the six ships that followed her, plus P&O’s Britannia.

What the Royal class changed

Three things, and they are all about sight lines to the sea.

The Piazza stopped being a lobby and became the middle of the ship. On the Grand-class ships the atrium was a stairwell with a café attached; here it is a three-deck room with the shops, bars and casual restaurants opening onto it and a fountain-and-light show at the center of the floor. It works well enough that Princess has not designed a ship without it since.

SeaWalk is the party trick and it is a real one, a glass-floored walkway cantilevered twenty-eight feet out past the side of the hull, so that you stand over open water with the ship’s flank behind you. It is unnerving for about a minute. It also gave her an unusual dimension: the hull is 126 feet across and about 154 with the SeaWalk hanging off it.

The balcony count was the commercial change. She has 1,780 cabins and roughly four in five have a balcony, which is a much higher proportion than the class she replaced, and it is the reason a Royal-class ship feels less crowded than a Crown-class one carrying only five hundred fewer people.

The nomad years

She has never settled. Her first six seasons were the conventional Princess pattern, Caribbean winters out of Port Everglades, European summers, fall in Canada and New England. Then in 2019 she took a 49-day circumnavigation of South America to reach Los Angeles, and since then she has worked the Pacific: the Mexican Riviera, the California coast, San Francisco, Alaska from Vancouver and Whittier, and an Australia and South Pacific season in 2023–24. A refit in early 2024 was the last significant work done on her.

Where she actually sails

Alaska out of Seattle is the largest block on her calendar, and it is close to half of everything on sale here, weekly Inside Passage round trips through the summer.

Then, on 19 September 2026, she leaves. The sailing is a 26-night run from Seattle to Singapore by way of Juneau, College Fjord, Whittier, Hubbard Glacier, Shimizu, Osaka, Keelung and Hong Kong, and it is the sort of itinerary that normally exists only inside a world cruise. A technical drydock in Singapore follows, then her first Southeast Asian sailings from there in November (a nine-night with an overnight in Ho Chi Minh City, Ko Samui and Bangkok), and then a fifteen-night repositioning through Lombok, Darwin, Yorkeys Knob and Brisbane to Sydney for the Australian season.

After that she alternates: Southern Hemisphere summers from Sydney and Auckland with New Zealand and South Pacific itineraries, Northern Hemisphere summers back at Seattle for Alaska, and the long crossings in between. The median booking is a week and the longest runs to thirty-six nights, which is the Pacific transit.

Who she suits

Alaska and Australia travelers who want a large, modern-layout Princess ship without paying for the newest one, and, more than anything, people who will book one of the crossings. The Seattle-to-Singapore run is the single most interesting thing on her calendar and there is nothing else on this site quite like it.

She does not suit anyone who assumes a 2013 ship is a current one. The Royal class was a large step forward in its day and has since been superseded by the two Sphere ships. There is no glass dome, the pool deck is open to whatever the weather is doing, and the interior is a 2013 interior with a 2024 refresh over it. She is also a difficult booking in the second half of 2026 if you want a short cruise, because for most of that period she is crossing an ocean.