New Cruise Ships May Be More Boring

According to the Miami Herald, we’ve reached the end of a golden age of cruise ship innovation and we won’t see any really exciting new ships for a while. There are still so me exciting new things to come down the slipway in the year ahead, because they were already commissioned, but from now on it’s likely that cruise liners will feature the best of the recent new developments without taking risks on ever more futuristic ideas.

This means that sister ships will look very much like their predeces so rs and Carnival, Celebrity, Costa MSC and Oceania are all planning siblings very much like their most recent launches, while two lines: Royal Caribbean and Norwegian Cruise Lines, have nothing ordered at present and are thinking about how they want to develop their brands. So what is likely to ‘stick’ and what will be given a ‘miss’?

The curved walls of Norwegian Epic aren’t going to be repeated – it seems that we don’t like being reminded too much that we’re on a cruise ship! Areas of peace and quiet are definitely going to stick though: so me of the most popular innovations have focused on serenity for adults and providing separate areas for kids to create mayhem. Nearly all lines will be giving a miss to building bigger ships; most seem to have reached saturation on size, but intimate dining is going to stick, with smaller dining rooms, and cabin dining becoming ever more popular – so me lines are looking at exclusive bookable dining rooms for small groups as part of their future offering too.