MSC Orders Four New “World Class” Ships
by Daniel McCarthyPhoto:
MSC Cruises has ordered four new World Class ships from STX France shipbuilders as part of its 10-year plan to invest a total of $10.2 billion in its fleet.
MSC made the announcement on Wednesday at the Élysée Palace in Paris with French president François Hollande on hand.
The four new “World Class” ships will feature “a record-breaking, futuristically-conceived design that will make the ship a truly unique place to be at sea, whilst maximizing the open air space available to guests,” said MSC executive chairman Pierfrancesco Vago.
They will be the largest in MSC’s fleet , and their size will rival Royal Caribbean’s Oasis Class—the largest in the world—at 200,000 tons.
“[They will have] the richest amenities and features for guests, for both families and their children as well as adults; cutting edge in design all around; featuring the latest and the best state-of-the-art smart technology at sea,” Vago said.
When it debuts, the World Class set of ships will be MSC’s sixth ship type, joining the existing Lirica, Musica, and Fantasia classes, as well as the soon-to-debut Meraviglia and Seaside classes.
That’s a very long period of time that we’re going to have a lot of growth in our company, and that directly results in travel agents having great job security.
— MSC’s Ken Muskat
The four ships will be delivered in 2022, 2024, 2025, and 2026, respectively. Each will have more than 2,700 staterooms.
In the next 10 years MSC will have up to 11 ships coming into service. While the World Class ships will reportedly cost $4.5 billion, MSC is investing another $5.7 billion on seven other new builds.
Among those, four will be in the Meraviglia and Meraviglia-Plus class and three in the new Seaside class. The first ship from each of those classes will debut next year.
‘We’re very excited’
With the expansion, MSC’s passenger capacity will grow from a 1.5 million to close to 5 million by 2026.
“This just shows our commitment to the industry,” executive vice president of sales and guests services Ken Muskat told TMR.
While MSC’s Fantasia class now are at almost 140,000 tons, the new 200,000-ton World Class ships will have everything MSC needs to “appeal to a more mass market cruiser,” Muskat said. “The more ships with more bells and whistles you have, the more you’re going to open up. The bigger ships give us more amenities, more technology, more of an overall great guest experience.”
And the good news for travel agents, Muskat said, is that a 10-year expansion plan means travel agents will continue to be vital to MSC—and the rest of the cruise industry—for at least the next decade.
“That’s a very long period of time that we’re going to have a lot of growth in our company, and that directly results in travel agents having great job security,” he said. MSC is currently relying on agents to sell to its 1.5 million a year, but as that number grows to 5 million by 2026, “we are going to need agents more than ever. For travel agents it sends a really strong message that profession is only going to become stronger and more needed.”
