Sun Princess

Sun Princess entered service in February 2024 as the first of the Sphere class, and she is the biggest structural rethink Princess has attempted in decades. Every large Princess ship since 1998 had descended from the Grand-class hull, the Royal class included; this is a new platform, larger, LNG-powered, and organized around two rooms that did not previously exist. Fincantieri built her at Monfalcone and delivered her at 177,882 tons, half again the size of the Grand-class ships that carried the line for a quarter of a century. Her sister Star Princess followed in 2025.

The two rooms that define her

The Dome. A glass geodesic structure on the top deck, inspired by the Santorini caldera, which is a swimming pool and sun terrace during the day and converts to an aerial-performance theater seating about 250 at night. It is the first fully glass-enclosed dome fitted to a cruise ship, and enclosing the top deck in glass is the single change that most affects how she sails a cool-weather itinerary; Northern Europe stops being a compromise.

Horizons. The main dining room, moved to the stern and stacked three decks high with floor-to-ceiling glass looking back over the wake. Princess’s older ships put the dining rooms mid-hull with portholes; this is the opposite instinct and it is a much better room for it.

What carried over

The Princess things that work are intact: Movies Under the Stars on the pool deck, the OceanMedallion that unlocks your cabin and finds your drink order wherever you are sitting, and the Sanctuary adults-only retreat. The Piazza survives too, rebuilt across three decks and pushed out to the hull side so that it now looks at the sea rather than at itself.

Where she sails

She is a two-ocean ship and the split is lopsided. The great majority of what is on sale here is the Mediterranean, seven, fourteen and twenty-one nights and occasionally longer, working out of Athens (Piraeus), Barcelona and Civitavecchia across an eight-month season that runs roughly April to November. Princess sold her August 2026 sailings as eclipse voyages, positioning her off the eastern coast of Spain for the total solar eclipse on the twelfth.

The rest is a winter Caribbean season out of Fort Lauderdale, reached by a transatlantic crossing in each direction. Those crossings are why the trip lengths on offer run as far as thirty-two nights against a median of fourteen.

Who she suits

Couples and multigenerational families who want a large, new, comfortable ship without the theme-park register of the biggest Royal Caribbean hulls. She is busy (4,300 guests is a lot), but the vertical layout and the glass keep her from feeling like it.

She suits you less if you want a ship you can learn in three days. Thirty-odd bars and restaurants on twenty-one decks takes a fortnight to get the measure of, which is roughly the length of the sailings she mostly sells, and that is not an accident.