Norwegian Goes Big: New Ships Match Oasis-Class Size

August 26, 2024 Randy Young

In April 2024, Norwegian Cruise Lines unveiled a massive new initiative to purchase four new ships on top of the three remaining Prima-class ships they already had on order. This new class of ship was going to be 200,000 gross registered tons and hold nearly 5,000 guests. Now, Cruise Industry News noticed that Norwegian upped a chart presented in their investor call last month.

New Norwegian Class Gets Even Bigger

When Norwegian announced this new class, the four ships were already called “mega-ships.” They were 20% larger than Norwegian’s current largest ship, the Encore, and way larger than the Prima-class. But now, we see they will be 225,000 gross tons and hold 5,100 guests, which puts them into Royal Caribbean’s Oasis-class category.

Royal Caribbean was the first cruise line to break the 200,000 gross registered tons threshold when it debuted the innovative Oasis of the Seas in 2009. Since then, most cruise lines have avoided entering the size race, but this year, that all changed. Norwegian’s new ships will be on par with the Royal Caribbean’s Oasis of the Seas.

	Royal Caribbean Oasis of the Seas	Norwegian Prima	Norwegian New Ship
Gross Tons	226,838	143,535	225,000
Passengers (double occupancy)	5,606	3,099	5,100
Space Ratio	40	46	44

When you look at the number of people, though, Norwegian’s ships will hold roughly 10% fewer people based on double occupancy. The space ratio for the new ships will be 44, an improvement over the 43 of the Prima-class and Royal Caribbean’s Oasis-class space ratio of 40. If the new design is like the Prima-class, a lot of this improvement of the space ratio is due to the large Haven area on the ship, meaning the average guests might not notice the extra space.

In July, Carnival Cruise Line also announced they’d be introducing their own mega-ship, coming in at around the same size as Norwegian’s new ships but carrying up to 8,000 guests. While we don’t know how many guests Norwegian’s new ships will hold (they don’t publish their maximum capacities), it’s not likely to be anywhere near Carnival’s number.

No Indication of Norwegian’s New Design

The first of the new ships will debut in 2030, so we’re still a long way out from seeing any renders or concepts of the ship. It will be interesting to see how they plan to accomplish this size while still making the ship manageable to get around.

So far, all cruise ships over 200,000 tons (Royal Caribbean’s Oasis- and Icon-class, MSC’s World-class, and Disney’s Global-class) have used a split-superstructure design. This design creates large courtyards in the middle of the ship, open to the air above, and have interior balconies line the space. They also break their ships into zones or neighborhoods for effective crowd management. So far, the shipyard that has been contracted for these ships, Fincantieri, hasn’t used this design. It’ll be interesting to see if Norwegian copies this concept or goes for a more traditional cruise ship design.