Ruby Princess

Ruby Princess was delivered by Fincantieri in October 2008 as the last of the three Crown-class ships (Crown, Emerald, Ruby) which were themselves the final and largest variant of the Grand class that Princess had been building since 1998. She was the biggest ship in the fleet until Royal Princess arrived in 2013. Ten years later the line stopped building on that hull entirely.

What the last version fixed

Grand Princess, ten years older, carried the famous spoiler: Skywalkers Nightclub slung off the stern on a cantilever, which looked like nothing else at sea, made the ship sit bow-high, and was cut off in 2011. On the Crown-class ships the same room was simply moved down and forward, into a structure just aft of the funnel. It works, it is still there, and it costs nothing in fuel. That is the whole design story of this generation: the same ship, with the awkward parts resolved.

The other change was size. At 118 feet across she is twelve feet broader than the Coral-class ships and some six thousand tons heavier than Grand Princess, which paid for three main dining rooms instead of two, Botticelli, Da Vinci and Michelangelo. Eighty percent of her outside cabins have balconies, which was not true of Princess ships a decade earlier.

She has been kept current by degrees rather than by one large rebuild. A 2015 drydock at Vancouver put in the Princess Luxury Beds and Club Class mini-suite service. An $8.2 million drydock in October 2018 added Slice Pizzeria, the Salty Dog Grill and SHARE, the Curtis Stone restaurant, which no longer appears in her venue list. A month at Vigor’s Portland yard from late September to late October 2023 was mostly technical: classification work, machinery, hull.

What no amount of that changes is that she is a 2008 ship. The cabins are 2008 cabins: adequate storage, few power outlets by current standards, bathrooms that are small. There is no Piazza on the scale of the Royal-class ships and no glass dome anywhere.

The part nobody advertises

In March 2020 Ruby Princess disembarked a full ship of passengers at Sydney without health screening. More than nine hundred infections and at least twenty-eight deaths were traced to that voyage, and for a period it accounted for over ten percent of Australia’s confirmed cases. It became the subject of a special commission of inquiry. It is the single most written-about event in this ship’s history and leaving it off her page would be dishonest. It says nothing about how she sails today.

Where she actually sails

San Francisco, entirely. Every sailing of hers on this site leaves from Pier 27, which makes her one of very few large ships homeported there all year rather than seasonally.

The pattern is Alaska in summer (round trips out of the Golden Gate rather than the usual Seattle or Vancouver runs, which adds sea days and cuts out a flight) Hawaii in the shoulder seasons on fifteen- and sixteen-night round trips, the Pacific Northwest and Mexico in between. Nothing is shorter than five nights and the median is ten.

Who she suits

Anyone within driving distance of the Bay Area, which is the entire reason this deployment exists. A round-trip Hawaii sailing from San Francisco with no airfare, on a ship with three dining rooms and a proper promenade deck, is one of the better value propositions on the site.

She also suits people who like the older Princess format: traditional dining times that actually work, a theater rather than an aerial-acrobatics venue, and enough sea days to use them.

She does not suit anyone who cares what the cabin looks like, or families expecting a water park. And her Alaska itineraries spend real time at sea getting north; if you want maximum port time per night booked, sail from Seattle on something else.