| IMO | 9636955 |
|---|---|
| Gross tonnage | 125,000 GT |
| Length | 300.0 m |
| Beam | 37.65 m |
| Passenger capacity (max) | 4350 |
| Builder | Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Nagasaki Shipyard & Machinery |
| Yard | Mitsubishi |
| Hull number | 2300 |
| Launched | 2015 |
| Maiden voyage | 2016-04-25 |
| Class | Hyperion-class cruise ship |
| Operator | AIDA Cruises |
| Status | Active |
Overview
AIDAprima is the lead ship of AIDA Cruises' Hyperion class and, on her delivery in 2016, became the German line's flagship and by far its largest ship. She is significant for two breaks with AIDA tradition. She was the first AIDA vessel not built by Meyer Werft at Papenburg since AIDAaura in 2003, coming instead from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries at Nagasaki in Japan; and she was designed from the outset as a year-round ship for northern Europe, with her pool and activity decks placed under cover so that a cruise from Hamburg in February could offer the same onboard life as one in July.
That second idea — the ship as an all-weather resort — is the one that stuck. Her Beach Club under a transparent dome and her Four Elements activity complex became templates repeated and enlarged in later AIDA ships, and her sister AIDAperla followed in 2017. Her construction, however, was troubled: repeatedly delayed, she entered service about a year later than planned, a saga that effectively ended Mitsubishi's return to large cruise ship building.
Key specifications
The dataset records her at 125,000 GT — her register figure is 125,572 GT — 300.0 metres long, 37.65 metres in beam, with a maximum passenger capacity of 4,350 and hull number 2300. Wikipedia's summary, drawn from her DNV register entry, gives a normal passenger capacity of about 3,250–3,300, a crew of 900, 18 decks and a cruising speed of 22 knots. Her machinery combines three Caterpillar MaK 12VM43C diesel engines with one dual-fuel MaK 12VM46DF engine able to burn LNG, driving two ABB Azipod XO podded propulsors — a podded, diesel-electric arrangement typical of her generation.
The dataset's maiden voyage date, 25 April 2016, should be read with care: it corresponds to her entry into passenger service in late April 2016, while Wikipedia gives her maiden voyage and christening date as 7 May 2016, in Hamburg. The discrepancy is logged in the batch notes.
Design and construction
AIDAprima was ordered from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in August 2011, as the first of a two-ship order, and built at Mitsubishi's Nagasaki Shipyard & Machinery Works. Her keel was laid on 14 December 2012 (construction is also described as beginning with keel-laying ceremonies in June 2013 at Nagasaki's Tategami plant ) and she was launched on 3 May 2014 — two years before the dataset's launched field of 2016, which is her completion year; she was completed and delivered on 14 March 2016.
Delivery had originally been planned for the first half of 2015. Mitsubishi was unable to complete her on time; delivery slipped first to December 2015 and then into 2016, after what Wikipedia describes as several minor accidents during construction, including a fire aboard at the yard in January 2016 reported in the maritime press. The overrun was widely reported as a heavy financial loss for the builder and is the reason the Hyperion class remained a pair rather than the start of a longer Japanese-built series.
Technically she was advanced for her date. She was the first cruise ship fitted with Mitsubishi's Air Lubrication System, which blows a carpet of small air bubbles along the bottom of the hull to reduce friction with the seawater, predicted to cut fuel consumption and CO2 emissions by more than 7 percent. She also combined a dual-fuel engine, a shore-power connection and a comprehensive exhaust after-treatment system — a combination her builder and operator presented as a first for a cruise ship.
Naming, launch and maiden voyage
Her name continues AIDA's fused brand-plus-word pattern, with "Prima" signalling her role as the first ship of a new generation and the line's flagship. She was launched at Nagasaki on 3 May 2014.
After delivery on 14 March 2016 she sailed from Japan to Europe — Ship Technology describes this delivery voyage from Yokohama to Hamburg as her maiden voyage in its narrative, while the christening voyage is the one usually counted as her public debut. She was christened on 7 May 2016 in Hamburg, as part of the 827th Hamburg Port Anniversary celebrations, by her godmother Emma Schweiger, then a young German actress. Hamburg was a deliberate choice: the ship had been designed around year-round sailing from that port, and the naming placed her at the centre of its biggest public festival.
Career by operator
| Name | Operator | Period |
|---|---|---|
| AIDAprima | AIDA Cruises | 2016–present |
She has had a single name and a single operator. Her career pattern was set by her design brief: year-round service from Hamburg into northern European waters, the role for which her covered decks were built. A public milestone of her early career came in September 2017, when she took part in the Hamburg Cruise Days and its Blue Port light show. She has remained an AIDA front-line ship since, with her sister AIDAperla sharing the Hyperion-class role in the fleet. No transfer, sale or renaming is recorded in the sources consulted.
Onboard character
AIDAprima's defining design move was to take the Mediterranean resort deck and put a roof on it. Her Beach Club is a pool area covered by a transparent, UV-permeable membrane dome, so passengers can sit in a beach setting in natural light in poor northern weather; at night the dome becomes a projection surface for star and laser shows and the space doubles as a disco. Next to it, the Four Elements complex combined what her operator described as the longest indoor water slide on a cruise ship with a climbing wall and a lazy river.
Around those set pieces sat the established grammar of the modern AIDA club ship — a three-storey theatre at the centre of the atrium, a large Body & Soul spa, a micro-brewery, and a broad spread of restaurants and bars across 18 decks. The significance of the design is that it decoupled the AIDA product from the weather: everything her predecessors did outdoors in the Mediterranean, AIDAprima was built to do indoors, under glass and membrane, in the North Sea winter.
Major refits and incidents
The incidents in her record belong to her construction rather than her service: the repeated delays and the minor accidents at Nagasaki, including the January 2016 fire reported by the maritime press, which pushed her delivery back by roughly a year overall.
Her most notable in-service upgrade came in 2020, when she was retrofitted with a 9,944 kWh Corvus Energy Orca battery system, one of the largest then fitted to a cruise ship. The battery is used for peak shaving — absorbing spikes in electrical demand so the engines run more evenly — reducing engine maintenance and CO2 emissions, and giving her a measure of hybrid operation alongside her dual-fuel engine and shore-power capability. No major casualty in service is recorded in the sources consulted.
Sister ships and class
AIDAprima is the lead ship of the two-ship Hyperion class. Her only sister is AIDAperla, delivered by Mitsubishi in April 2017 to the same basic design, which took the covered Beach Club and Four Elements concepts into Mediterranean service. The class was AIDA's intermediate step in size between the Sphinx-class ships of roughly 70,000 GT and the 183,900 GT Helios-class pair that followed: at about 125,000 GT the Hyperion ships roughly doubled the tonnage of the earlier fleet while keeping a conventional, non-LNG main machinery plant, supplemented later by battery hybridisation in AIDAprima's case.
Fate and where she is now
Her dataset status is active, and the sources agree: AIDAprima remains in service with AIDA Cruises, with no announced sale, transfer or withdrawal. As the lead ship of a two-ship class now a decade old, she sits in the mature middle of the AIDA fleet — no longer the flagship in size, but still the ship that defined the line's all-weather, Hamburg-based direction.
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cruise_ships, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDAprima, https://maritime-executive.com/article/first-dual-fuel-air-lubricated-cruise-ship-delivered, http://www.ship-technology.com/projects/aidaprima-cruise-ship/