Star Princess

There have been two Star Princesses, and almost everything written about the first one is wrong about this one. The 2002 ship was a Grand-class hull that left Princess in 2021, sailed for P&O Cruises Australia as Pacific Encounter, and since March 2025 has been running out of Brisbane for Carnival Cruise Line as Carnival Encounter. The ship on this page is a different animal: 177,882 tons, delivered by Fincantieri at Monfalcone in September 2025, and as of now the newest ship Princess operates.

The second Sphere ship

She is the sister of Sun Princess, and the structural argument of that class (the glass Dome on the top deck, the Piazza rebuilt vertically against a wall of sea-facing glass, the stern dining room, liquefied natural gas in the tanks) is set out on Sun Princess’s page and is not worth repeating here. What matters about Star is that she is the second one, built two years after the first with the first one’s feedback in hand.

The visible result is in the rooms. There are around thirty dining and bar venues aboard. Spellbound by Magic Castle is a close-up magic bar licensed from the Hollywood clubhouse, a small room with a bartender, a magician and a two-drink minimum, which is a strange thing to find on a ship of this size and the best argument for it. Love by Britto is a seven-course tasting room built around the work of the artist Romero Britto. Makoto Ocean does Edomae-style sushi, Umai Teppanyaki does the knife-juggling griddle format, and The Catch by Rudi is the seafood room. Suite guests get the Sanctuary Collection: a private restaurant, a private pool deck, and a keycard boundary that the rest of the ship does not cross.

The entertainment is also hers rather than her sister’s. The Princess Arena, a theater seating over a thousand, carries two productions written for this ship, Meridian, a masked-ball piece, and Illuminate, which is a circus. The Dome gets converted for candlelit classical concerts on some evenings, which is a better use of a glass room at sea than anything else anyone has thought of.

Where she actually sails

She crossed to the Americas fast. After the Mediterranean autumn of 2025 and a Caribbean winter out of Fort Lauderdale, she made her first Panama Canal transit in April 2026, called at Los Angeles at the end of that month, and opened her first Alaska season at Seattle’s Pier 91 on 3 May 2026, twenty weekly round trips through the Inside Passage to Ketchikan, Juneau, Skagway and the Dawes Glacier at the head of Endicott Arm, running to mid-September.

That is now the shape of her year: Alaska from Seattle in summer, the Caribbean in winter from Fort Lauderdale and Port Canaveral, and a Panama Canal repositioning in each direction to join the two. The median booking on her is a week. Los Angeles turns up as a call and an occasional turnaround rather than a base.

Alaska is where the Dome earns its cost. A top-deck pool under glass is a gimmick in the Caribbean and the single most useful thing on the ship in a Southeast Alaska drizzle.

Who she suits

People who want a brand-new large ship without the theme-park volume of the biggest Royal Caribbean hulls, and who are willing to book the good rooms in advance; Spellbound seats a few dozen people a night on a ship carrying 4,300.

She does not suit anyone hunting for a bargain; she is the newest hull in the fleet and priced accordingly. She does not suit anyone who wants a quiet ship, and she is a poor choice for travelers who want the classic Princess layout, because the Sphere class moved almost every room they would be looking for. If you have sailed Sun Princess and liked her, this is that ship with better specialty dining. If you did not like Sun, nothing here fixes the parts you disliked.