Testing the Waters with Dori – A Rant on Modern Big Cruise Ship Building

With 2025 just weeks away from coming to an end, I find myself looking back at all the new ships that joined the global cruise fleet this past year. (That four of them were just named in a two-week christening blitz has new ships very top-of-mind at the moment.) It was a big year for the cruise industry with nine new ships from mainstream and premium lines that ranged in passenger capacity from 998 (Viking Vesta) to a maximum of 7,600 (Star of the Seas).

While each ship is uniquely different from the others, some patterns have emerged over the last few years when it comes to the building of new cruise ships, particularly at the larger end of the spectrum.

I can’t say I’m a fan of it all.

First, let me say I absolutely love that shipbuilders are getting smarter about how to use the space in a stateroom. There’s generally more storage room in cabins as designers have figured out how to maximize space – and cruisers have gotten more demanding about what they expect to find in a cabin; like hooks to hang the winter jackets they have to schlep from colder environs.

It’s in the public spaces that I’m seeing some trends that I’m not a fan of.

As ships get bigger, there’s a greater imperative to provide a larger variety of spaces to fill the varied needs of so many passengers. One or two specialty restaurants can’t fill the needs of 4,000-plus passengers. Neither does two or three showings of the same performance in the theater each night.

This trend towards more choice pairs well with what I call the “urban hotel” trend, which is transforming cruise ship décor to resemble that of a high-end urban hotel. (Said another way, if someone were instantly transported to the lobby or atrium of most cruise ships built in the last three years and told to guess where they are, few would guess a cruise ship.) This modern aesthetic gives ships a more sophisticated feel and mimics what land vacationers find when they travel, including access to all the dining, lounge, and entertainment choices that surround a city hotel.

On the one hand, this is great, there are more restaurants, more entertainment venues, more bars, etc. Press releases I get are filled with boasts about how many dining, lounge, and bar venues each new ship will offer guests.

Ships also generally feel modern instead of chintzy. (For those who don’t want to forget they’re at sea, most ship designs also maximize outdoor space, including providing more al fresco dining options.)

The flipside of this coin, though, is that to provide so many more venues, each venue has to get smaller, which means all the venues fill up quicker and it’s harder, not easier to get a dining reservation. The same holds true for entertainment venues. Yes, there are more shows to choose from, but how often do you have to tell your clients to get to an entertainment venue 30 to 45 minutes early if they want to get a seat? Back when there was just one show on a ship, you just had to show up 20 minutes early. (By the way, I’m not saying that having just one show is better, I’m simply saying there was enough space for everyone.)

(There are some exceptions to all of this. For instance, when a cruise line realizes that one venue is particularly popular, it might try to make tweaks on the next ship to enlarge that space.)

In conjunction with the above, there’s also been a move, particularly among one shipyard in particular, to focus much of the ship’s entertainment on a central location, one that most cruisers regularly have to pass through. The thought here is that having a busy central zone brings everyone into the fun. But a central atrium or lobby can only be so big. Like the rest of the smaller spaces onboard, this central space can fill up very fast, particularly for popular events. That leaves more people than not standing at the back with no way of seeing anything. (Or again, wasting valuable vacation time by arriving 45 minutes or more early.)

To be completely fair, not all of this year’s new ships have this problem. Without naming names, there is one cruise line, in partnership with a different shipyard, that has perfected the art of creating lots of varied spaces while also mastering traffic management, resulting in little to no overcrowding (other than the buffet, no cruise line has figured out that one yet!).  

To be fair, I didn’t make it onto every new ship this past year, so I can’t speak personally to every new ship that launched. But I can think of at least two that I was on that have fallen “victim” to these new trends. The end result, in my opinion, looks and sounds fantastic, but results in a great deal of frustration – which is the exact opposite of another trend I hear about a lot: removing friction from the cruise process.

Whether it’s having to get to a secondary theater 45 minutes early, needing to reserve all of your dinners (or entertainment where reservation are available) pre-cruise, or struggling to find a spot to sit for trivia because it’s now in a smaller lounge, offering more is sometimes leading to less these days.

And that’s a trend I’m not a fan of.

Is it just me? Anyone else noticing that the bigger the ship, the smaller the venues and the more difficult it is to actually have the cruise experience you want? Let me know what you’re seeing or if you’re hearing this from your clients. You can email me at dsaltzman@travelmarketreport.com.