A cruise ship's name is the most visible thing about her and the least permanent. Hulls routinely outlive the brands painted on their sterns by decades: a ship launched for one line in one decade may be cruising for a third owner, under a fourth name, in another ocean entirely, while the steel, the engines and the legal identity underneath remain exactly what they were on the day she was launched. Understanding how ships are named — and why they are renamed — is the key to reading any fleet list, including this directory.
Naming traditions: the house pattern
Most large lines name ships to a pattern, so that a name alone tells you whose ship she is before you see the funnel. Royal Caribbean International is the clearest case: every large ship since Song of Norway has carried a name ending in "of the Seas" — Voyager of the Seas, Oasis of the Seas, Icon of the Seas. The formula is a brand asset in itself, varied only in the first word, which signals the class or the mood the line wants to sell.
Norwegian Cruise Line builds names around the word "Norwegian" and a second word evoking light, weather, freedom of movement and the spirit of the places cruised to: Norwegian Sun, Norwegian Sky, Norwegian Spirit, Norwegian Escape, Norwegian Prima. The pattern loosened as the fleet grew, but the structure — company first, evocation second — has held for half a century.
AIDA Cruises, the German line, fuses its own name into every ship: AIDAdiva, AIDAbella, AIDAluna, AIDAsol, AIDAnova. The second element is short, bright and easy in any language, and the ships themselves carry the line's smiling face — kissing lips at the bow, eyes along the hull — so that name and livery make the same cheerful point. MSC Cruises has historically named ships for qualities, music and beautiful things — MSC Fantasia, MSC Splendida, MSC Preziosa, MSC Bellissima — and, in its newest and largest class, for the world itself and its regions: MSC World Europa, MSC World America, MSC World Asia. Other lines work the same way with their own vocabularies: Princess Cruises favours royal and celestial words, Holland America keeps Dutch place-names ending in "-dam", and Cunard, almost alone, recycles the names of queens.
A name is also chosen with an eye to the market the ship will serve, the language of her passengers, and simple availability: a name must be registrable, pronounceable and free of unfortunate meanings in the ports she will visit.
Sponsors, godmothers and the naming ceremony
The ceremonial naming of a ship by a sponsor — in cruise shipping, usually a godmother — descends from far older rituals for blessing a vessel and those who sail in her. Greek and Roman practice blessed ships with water; medieval practice used wine; by the nineteenth century the ceremony had become a public spectacle, performed by a woman of standing, with champagne replacing wine and a bottle broken against the bow. The liner era made it a fixture of national and corporate prestige: queens, princesses and presidents' wives named the great liners, and the sponsor spoke the ship's name aloud — "I name this ship…" — before releasing the bottle.
Modern cruise lines keep the form and use it as the new ship's public debut. The godmother is now often a celebrity, an athlete, a crew member chosen by the line, or, in some cases, a godfather or a whole group of godparents. The bottle is usually released by lever or button rather than thrown, a concession to the size of modern hulls, and a bottle that fails to break is still, by long tradition, regarded as an ill omen. The ceremony's function, though, is the same as it was in 1900: it marks the moment a hull becomes a named ship in the public mind.
Why ships are renamed
The most persistent piece of folklore is that renaming a ship brings bad luck. Seamen have repeated it for centuries, and a small industry of "denaming" rituals exists to ward it off. There is no evidence for it, and the commercial record points the other way: renaming is routine, frequent and done for plain business reasons.
The first is brand identity. A name belongs to the line that created it. When a ship is sold, the seller does not sell the goodwill in names such as Sovereign of the Seas or Celebrity Galaxy; the buyer renames her to fit its own pattern, and the old name is painted out, usually at the same refit that changes her livery, interiors and funnel colours. The second reason is transfer within a group. The big cruise corporations move hulls between their brands as markets shift, and a transfer almost always means a rename to the receiving brand's pattern. The third is charter work: a ship chartered to a tour operator or another line for a season or a series of years may sail under a charter name for the duration, then revert. A fourth, quieter reason is diplomacy and taste: names tied to a previous owner's country, language or history may simply not suit the new trade.
One hull, one number, many names
Through every change, one identifier does not move. Under the IMO ship identification number scheme, each ship is given a seven-digit number that, in the IMO's own words, "remains unchanged during the entire life of the ship; even if the flag, name, ownership or type changes", and numbers from ships no longer in operation are not reallocated. That permanence is why this directory keys every page by hull and IMO number, and lists all of a ship's names on it: the name is a chapter, the hull is the book.
Some hulls accumulate a remarkable number of chapters. The directory's most travelled example is the ship now called Astoria (IMO 5383304), whose recorded names run to eleven: Stockholm, Völkerfreundschaft, Volker, Fridtjof Nansen, Italia I, Italia Prima, Valtur Prima, Caribe, Athena, Azores and Astoria. The Marella fleet shows the normal modern pattern at smaller scale. Marella Explorer (IMO 9106297) was launched as Galaxy and has since been Celebrity Galaxy, Mein Schiff and Mein Schiff 1 before taking her Marella name; her fleetmate Marella Voyager has followed the same road from Mercury, through Celebrity Mercury and two Mein Schiff identities, to her current name. Three to five names is unremarkable for a ship that has passed between groups; what would be remarkable is the opposite.
The exception that proves the rule is Queen Elizabeth 2 (IMO 6725418). She kept the one name she was launched with for her entire career, through a change from Atlantic liner to cruise ship and on into preservation as a hotel in Dubai — a continuity possible because Cunard, her only operator, never sold her into another brand's fleet during her working life.
When a name is used twice
Names, unlike IMO numbers, are freely reused, and lines regularly revive famous ones for new hulls. That creates the two-ships-one-name problem. Carnival Cruise Line's Mardi Gras is the directory's clearest case. The first Mardi Gras was the ship that founded the line in 1972 — herself not new, but the former Empress of Canada (IMO 5103936), which went on to be Olympic, Star of Texas, Lucky Star and Apollon after Carnival sold her. The second Mardi Gras (IMO 9837444) is the Excel-class flagship launched in 2021, a different hull in every respect except the name and the line. Both have pages in this directory, under different IMO numbers, which is precisely why the number, not the name, has to be the key.
Sources: https://www.imo.org/en/ourwork/iiis/pages/imo-identification-number-schemes.aspx; https://www.worldofcruising.co.uk/advice/i-name-this-ship; https://WWW.CRUISECRITIC.COM/articles/what-is-a-cruise-ship-godmother