Seven Seas Navigator

Seven Seas Navigator is the oldest and the smallest ship Regent operates, and the only one whose steel was ordered by the Soviet Union.

The hull

Her keel was laid at the Admiralty Shipyard in Leningrad in April 1988. She was to be Akademik Nikolay Pilyugin, a satellite- and missile-tracking vessel named for one of the engineers who designed the guidance systems she was built to watch, a spy ship in the loose sense the phrase usually gets used, and a research ship in the sense her owners described her. She was launched in August 1991, four months before the country that ordered her stopped existing. Work continued in a desultory way and then stopped altogether, and the unfinished hull was sold.

V.Ships took her on, Radisson Seven Seas bought her, and she went to T. Mariotti in Genoa, the same yard that would later build Seven Seas Voyager. What Mariotti did was not a conversion in the usual sense. The original machinery and superstructure were stripped out and scrapped, a new power plant went in, and a cruise ship’s accommodation was built on top of a naval hull designed to hold tracking antennas steady in a seaway. She entered service in August 1999.

What is left of the original intent is mostly in her proportions: 560 feet on an 81-foot beam is stockier than anything Regent has built since. The rest is a 1999 cruise ship that has been refurbished repeatedly, including a forty-million-dollar refit in 2016.

What is and is not aboard

Four places to eat: Compass Rose, the main dining room; Prime 7, the steakhouse; Sette Mari at La Veranda, which is the buffet by day and Italian by night; and the Pool Grill. That is one specialty restaurant fewer than Voyager carries and several fewer than the newer ships. There is no Chartreuse here.

She is all-suite but she is not all-balcony. Roughly one suite in seven has a picture window instead of a veranda, and she is the only ship in the fleet where that is true. It is the first thing to check on her deck plan, because the difference is not priced as an afterthought.

The number that matters more is the space. At 28,803 tons for 490 guests she carries about fifty-nine gross tons per person, where a large mainstream ship runs near forty. There are around 340 crew to 490 guests. Neither figure makes her a new ship, but both explain why she does not feel like a small one.

What the fare covers

Every Regent fare includes unlimited shore excursions, every restaurant aboard including the specialty rooms, drinks including wine and spirits, gratuities and WiFi. Since July 2024 flights are not in the base fare: the All-Inclusive Cruise Fare leaves you to book your own air, and the Ultimate All-Inclusive Fare adds roundtrip flights in a class of your choosing plus up to five hundred dollars a suite in private-transfer credit. Neither covers the spa, the salon, the casino, or anything you arrange ashore on your own.

That math favors a particular passenger: the one who would have booked a tour in every port and ordered wine with dinner anyway. If you take one excursion a week and do not drink, you are paying for somebody else’s.

Her last two years

She spent the summer of 2026 on farewell voyages in Northern Europe from British, Swedish and French homeports, came back to the Mediterranean in August, and stays there through a winter, the first winter season Regent has run in the Mediterranean. From early 2027 she works east and south: Africa, then Asia, then Australia, with Barcelona, Athens, Kobe and Sydney all doing duty as turnaround ports and voyages running from nine nights to twenty-eight.

Then she leaves. In March 2026 Avora Residences took her on a nine-year charter with a nominal purchase option; after a residential conversion she becomes Avora Lumina in January 2028, sailing from Lisbon on a three-year continuous circumnavigation with 242 apartments selling from about $545,000. An earlier deal with a different residential startup, announced in March 2025, was abandoned that November. Her final Regent sailing ends in late 2027, closing out twenty-eight years with the line.

Who she suits

People who want long, port-dense itineraries with a tour included in every one of them, on a ship small enough to have learned by the second morning. The Asia and Australia legs in 2027 are the most interesting thing on her schedule and the reason to look at her rather than at a newer fleetmate.

She is expensive. Per night she sits near the top of anything on this site, and what you get for it is a twenty-seven-year-old ship with a 1990s hull and no balcony guarantee. She does not suit families, anyone who wants a large ship or a new one, or anyone who books on the assumption that all suites here are equal; they are not. And if you want to sail her under Regent colors at all, the window shuts in late 2027.