| IMO | 9584724 |
|---|---|
| Gross tonnage | 142,714 GT |
| Length | 330.0 m |
| Beam | 38.4 m |
| Passenger capacity (double) | 3560 |
| Passenger capacity (max) | 4380 |
| Builder | Fincantieri |
| Yard | Fincantieri |
| Hull number | 6224 |
| Launched | 2013 |
| Maiden voyage | 2014 |
| Class | Royal-class cruise ship |
| Operator | Princess Cruises |
| Status | Active |
Overview
Regal Princess is a Royal-class cruise ship operated by Princess Cruises and, with her earlier sister Royal Princess, the ship that defined Princess's return to large newbuilds in the 2010s. When she was delivered in May 2014 she and her sister were the largest ships Fincantieri had ever built, and the largest in the Princess fleet. She is the second Princess ship to carry the Regal Princess name; the first, delivered in 1991, was one of the Renzo Piano-designed pair that gave Princess its dolphin-like profile a generation earlier. The 2014 ship took the revived name deliberately, as Royal Princess had done the year before, tying the new class to the line's best-known earlier tonnage.
Her significance is as much cultural as naval. Princess Cruises is the line The Love Boat made famous, and Regal Princess was named in Fort Lauderdale on 5 November 2014 by the six principal cast members of the television series, acting as her godparents — an unusually direct piece of cruise history, and the launch of the line's fiftieth-anniversary celebrations. In service she has been a mainstream large-ship workhorse: a big, balcony-heavy vessel designed around an enlarged central atrium and signature spaces Princess then repeated across the class.
Key specifications
The dataset records Regal Princess at 142,714 GT, 330.0 m long with a beam of 38.4 m, built as Fincantieri hull 6224. Contemporary delivery reporting described her as a roughly 141,000 GT ship of 330 m by 38 m — the difference is the usual gap between design-stage rounded figures and the measured tonnage on the ship's own record, and the dataset figure is the one carried here. Fincantieri's delivery coverage gives 1,780 cabins, of which 1,438 have balconies — about 81 per cent of all cabins — a balcony ratio that was a headline figure for a ship of this size in 2014. The dataset's capacity figure of 3,560 is the double-occupancy (lower-berth) number quoted by Princess at launch; maximum capacity with all berths filled is higher, reported at about 4,380 guests, with around 1,346 crew reported in launch-era material. She has 19 decks. No service speed is recorded in the dataset, and none is asserted here.
Design and construction
Regal Princess was ordered, with Royal Princess, on 17 February 2010; the final contract with Fincantieri was signed on 4 May 2010. Her keel was laid at Fincantieri's Monfalcone yard in August 2012. She was the 32nd cruise ship built at Monfalcone and the 14th for Princess Cruises, in a yard relationship that stretches back decades. Building a Royal-class ship was reported to require roughly three million man-hours and about 37,000 tons of steel.
The design is an evolution of Princess practice rather than a break with it: a hydrodynamic hull with a large bulbous bow, a balcony-dominated superstructure, and the ship's public heart moved decisively to the middle. Where the class broke new ground was in two structures cantilevered over the sea — the SeaWalk and its companion SeaView Bar — and in a central Piazza roughly half as large again as the atriums of the line's earlier ships. Two changes from Royal Princess were built into Regal Princess from the start: a proper promenade deck and an aft terrace pool, answering the most common criticisms of the lead ship.
Naming, launch and maiden voyage
The ship was floated out of the Monfalcone building dock on 26 March 2013 — a year earlier than the dataset's "launched 2014" entry, which records her entry-into-service year rather than the float-out; the discrepancy is logged with this guide. Carolyn Spencer Brown, then editor of Cruise Critic, acted as madrina for the float-out ceremony. Sea trials were run in the Adriatic from 16 to 21 April 2014, and Fincantieri delivered the ship on 11 May 2014, at a ceremony attended by Italy's prime minister, Matteo Renzi.
After a four-night pre-inaugural sailing from Trieste to Kotor (16–20 May 2014), her maiden voyage departed Venice on 20 May 2014 — a seven-day sailing to Athens, brought forward from the originally announced 2 June debut. The formal naming waited until Florida: on 5 November 2014, in Fort Lauderdale, the six original Love Boat cast members — Gavin MacLeod, Fred Grandy, Ted Lange, Bernie Kopell, Lauren Tewes and Jill Whelan — named her as godparents, pulling a lever that smashed 50 champagne bottles against the hull for the line's golden anniversary, followed by a 51st, oversized bottle for the future.
Career by operator
Regal Princess has had one name and one operator throughout her life.
| Period | Name | Operator |
|---|---|---|
| 2014–present | Regal Princess | Princess Cruises |
Her career pattern has been the standard Princess rotation of seasonal deployment between Europe and North America, beginning with a Mediterranean inaugural season in summer 2014 and a first Caribbean winter from Fort Lauderdale. In 2017 she became the first ship in the fleet to introduce Carnival Corporation's OceanMedallion wearable technology to guests. The COVID-19 shutdown interrupted her service in 2020, after which she returned to regular deployment. No sale, charter or transfer has been recorded for the hull.
Onboard character
The Royal class's era-defining move was to make the atrium the ship. The three-deck Piazza, about 50 per cent larger than on earlier Princess ships, is ringed by cafés, bars and shops and functions as an indoor town square with spiral staircases and live performance, rather than as a lobby to pass through. The second signature is the SeaWalk: a glass-bottomed walkway on the top deck extending more than 28 feet (about 8.5 m) beyond the ship's edge, some 128 feet above the water, with the glass-floored SeaView Bar opposite it. Together they made "walking over the sea" the class's postcard image.
The rest of the design language is consolidation: balconies on all outside staterooms, an adults-only Sanctuary retreat carried over from earlier ships, a television studio venue (Princess Live!), and a dedicated pastry shop billed at launch as the largest at sea. Regal Princess's own contributions — the wraparound promenade and the aft Terrace Pool — were corrections toward traditional ship pleasures: open deck to walk on, and a quiet pool facing the wake.
Major refits and incidents
No major casualty, grounding or fire is recorded for Regal Princess in the sources used for this guide. Her documented alterations are evolutionary rather than structural: the 2017 work associated with the OceanMedallion rollout, which made her the technology's debut ship, and the normal cycle of drydock maintenance and interior refresh since. A complete, dated refit-by-refit chronology is not published in a single authoritative source, and none is invented here. Her 2020–21 pandemic layup — a period out of service shared with almost the entire world cruise fleet — is the longest interruption to her career to date.
Sister ships and class
Regal Princess is the second of the Royal class. The class lead, Royal Princess (2013), introduced the design; Majestic Princess (2017) followed, built with features aimed at the Chinese market; and the class was then extended by Sky Princess (2019), Enchanted Princess (2021) and Discovery Princess (2022), which repeat the platform at slightly increased tonnage. All were built by Fincantieri at Monfalcone. The class was succeeded in Princess service by the larger, LNG-powered Sphere class (Sun Princess, 2024, and Star Princess, 2025), which keeps the Royal class's general arrangement ideas — the big central atrium above all — at a larger scale.
Fate and where she is now
Regal Princess remains in active service with Princess Cruises, the status recorded in the dataset, with no announced sale, transfer or retirement. She is a little over a decade into a career that, on the precedent of her Princess predecessors, should run for many more years; the first Regal Princess served the line for 16 years before moving on. Her place in the fleet has shifted as newer, larger ships have arrived — she is no longer the flagship in size — but the Royal class remains the backbone design of the modern Princess fleet, and she is its second example.
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cruise_ships, https://www.cruisemapper.com/ships/Regal-Princess-798, https://www.seatrade-cruise.com/shipbuilding-equipment/fincantieri-s-monfalcone-yard-delivers-regal-princess, https://www.travelpress.com/regal-princess-to-debut-early/