AIDA Cruises is the German-market line whose ships carry a painted kissing-lips mouth and eyes on the bow. The brand began in Rostock in 1996, when Deutsche Seereederei introduced AIDA — later renamed AIDAcara — as a 'club ship', applying the informal, activity-led model of a holiday resort to cruising for a younger German-speaking audience; the line later became part of the Carnival group. The fleet below begins after that founding generation. Its backbone is the Sphinx class: seven sister ships of roughly 69,000 to 71,000 GT launched between 2007 and 2012, which standardised the AIDA formula at mid-size. The Hyperion-class pair, AIDAprima and AIDAperla, took the design to about 125,000 GT, and the Excellence class then pushed scale further still — AIDAnova, at 183,858 GT, was an early large LNG-powered cruise ship, followed by AIDAcosma. One older ship, the 42,289 GT Blue Dream Melody of 2002, completes the list.
The fleet — 12 ships in this directory
Sources: https://www.cruiseturtle.com/shipping-companies/aida-cruises, https://www.aida.de/en/nc/aida-cruises/responsibility/news-responsability/news.23979/browse/118/article/20-years-of-aida-a-success-story-celebrates-its-anniversary.html