Princess Just Ordered Three of Its Biggest Ships Ever — Delivered 2035, 2038, 2039

Princess Cruises just ordered three of the biggest ships in its history. The announcement came at Seatrade Cruise Global 2026, the industry's largest conference to date, with reported deliveries in 2035, 2038, and 2039.

That's not a typo. The first ship arrives nearly a decade from now.

If you booked Princess because it felt like the line that hadn't gone full theme park, this is a moment worth stopping for.

The calm option is building megaships

For years, Princess sat in a specific slot. Bigger than Holland America, smaller than Royal Caribbean, and quieter than both on most sailings. You could recognize other passengers by day three. The piano bar wasn't ironic.

The Voyager-class order reframes that. Three ships in the class Princess itself is calling its biggest ever is not a tweak — it's a direction.

And the direction points up in capacity, which almost always means up in everything else: more venues, more zones, more passengers in the buffet line at 7:45 p.m.

A decade is a long time to wait for a ship

Let's sit with the timeline for a second. You can book a Princess ship today that doesn't exist yet and won't exist until a child born in 2026 enters high school.

That's not necessarily a bad thing — cruise orders are famously long-lead — but it does create a weird in-between decade. From now until 2035, the Princess fleet is mostly the ships already sailing. From 2035 to 2039, three new megaships phase in. Somewhere in there, older ships likely shift to sister brands or quietly get sold.

So the fleet you book from in 2030 will not be the fleet you book from in 2036.

Your next Princess sailing, two ways

Picture a current Princess sailing. You're on a Sphere-class ship, about 4,300 passengers at double occupancy. The Piazza is busy but not loud. You see the same couple from dinner at trivia the next night. The pool deck has chairs open at 2 p.m. on a sea day.

Now picture boarding a Voyager-class Princess ship in 2036. The atrium is bigger. There are more dining venues than any week can fit. The pool deck on a sea day has neighborhoods, not just sides. You'll still find quiet corners — big ships always have them — but you'll have to look harder.

Neither experience is wrong. They're different products wearing the same logo.

What today's booker should actually do

The short version: decide which Princess you want, then book the fleet that matches.

If you're curious about the megaship direction and willing to wait, the 2035+ ships are a plausible future booking — but book something else in the meantime. Nine years is a long time.

And if mid-size is non-negotiable and you're worried about the brand drifting, Oceania and Holland America still sit squarely in the smaller-ship lane. Worth comparing both.

The industry wave Princess is riding

Princess isn't deciding this in a vacuum. Cruise demand is running hot — CLIA's latest outlook projects more than 40 million ocean passengers before 2030, building on roughly 37.7 million in 2025. Every major line is either building megaships or ordering them.

Seatrade Cruise Global 2026 itself was the largest in the event's 41-year history, drawing more than 12,500 attendees from 128 countries. That's the backdrop for this announcement: a conference full of orders, with Fincantieri — the Italian shipbuilder behind most of the modern Princess fleet — confirmed as the builder, with the three Voyager-class hulls slated for its Monfalcone yard.

In that context, Princess not ordering megaships would've been the bigger surprise.

Why Princess is ordering now — not in 2030

Shipyard slots are the bottleneck, not demand. Fincantieri and the other major cruise builders are booked well into the 2030s, so placing an order in 2026 for a late-2035 delivery isn't patience. It's the only way to get in line.

Every major line at Seatrade had the same math in front of them.

That's part of why the announcement looks so dramatic on paper. Three ships is a big number in one headline, but spread across 2035, 2038, and 2039, it's a ship every couple of years — roughly the pace at which Princess has been delivering new tonnage for the last decade. The class is new. The cadence, less so.

Where this leaves the calm Princess feel

Here's the honest part. The Princess that exists today — mid-size, Piazza-centric, mellow — will keep sailing for years. The Voyager-class ships don't erase it overnight.

But the brand's center of gravity is going to move. New marketing photos, new cruise director energy, new post-pandemic booking patterns all flow toward the newest ships. That's how every cruise line works.

If you want to lock in the version of Princess you fell in love with, the window is the current fleet, booked before 2030. GoCruiseTravel.com filters Princess by ship class, so you can pick by what each ship actually is instead of guessing from a brochure. Current Princess sailings side-by-side at GoCruiseTravel.com, sortable by per-night price, makes that comparison about as painless as it gets.

Princess wasn't supposed to be the megaship line. In 2035, it is one anyway.