| IMO | 9837468 |
|---|---|
| Gross tonnage | 145,281 GT |
| Length | 330 m |
| Beam | 38.38 m |
| Passenger capacity (max) | 3660 |
| Crew | 1346 |
| Service speed | 22 knots |
| Builder | Fincantieri |
| Hull number | 6290 |
| Launched | 2021 |
| Maiden voyage | 2022 |
| Class | Royal-class cruise ship |
| Operator | Princess Cruises |
| Status | Active |
Overview
Discovery Princess is the sixth and final Royal-class cruise ship built for Princess Cruises, and the last ship of a class that carried the line through the 2010s. Ordered in January 2017, built by Fincantieri in Italy, completed in January 2022 and in service from March 2022, she closed a nine-year production run that began with Royal Princess in 2013. At 145,000 GT in the dataset — 145,281 GT in some registry-derived listings of the enlarged final trio — she is tied as one of the largest ships Princess had taken delivery of at her debut, before the still larger Sphere class arrived with Sun Princess in 2024.
The dataset row for this hull is unusually thin — length, beam, capacity, speed and hull number are all blank — and this guide states those gaps openly, supplies the sourced figures from her article in the narrative, and logs the gaps for dataset completion.
Key specifications
The dataset records Discovery Princess at 145,000 GT, IMO 9837468, built by Fincantieri, Royal class, launched and in service in 2022, status active. It records no length, beam, capacity, crew, speed or hull number; the spec box above says so rather than filling those fields from another source, per this directory's rule that the spec box is a dataset artefact.
Dates in the dataset are years only, and the launch year is the delivery year: her article records float-out on 18 March 2021, completion on 27 January 2022, acquisition on 28 January 2022, christening on 29 April 2022 and maiden voyage on 27 March 2022. The narrative follows those dates.
Design and construction
The Royal class was Fincantieri's platform for Princess from 2013: a broad, high ship organised around a multi-deck central Piazza atrium, with the SeaWalk — a glass-bottomed walkway cantilevered about 8.5 metres beyond the ship's edge, high above the sea — as the class's signature external feature, and a large open top deck with pools, an outdoor cinema and retreat spaces. Discovery Princess, built at Monfalcone as hull 6290, is to that design in its enlarged final form, with a hull of 330 metres — substantially longer than the 306-metre Edge-class ship in this batch and the 290-metre Carnival ships, reflecting the Royal class's 19-deck scale.
Construction was ordered on 19 January 2017 in the class chronology. Steel cutting for the ship is recorded in the class history on 14 February 2019, shared as a milestone date with Enchanted Princess's keel laying in class reporting. She was floated out on 18 March 2021, in the middle of the pandemic period that had stopped cruising worldwide and slowed shipyard and delivery schedules across the industry. Fitting out continued through 2021 to completion on 27 January 2022 — a build that therefore spans the entire COVID disruption, from a pre-pandemic steel cut to a delivery made as the industry restarted.
Her naming within the design process came on 4 October 2019, when Princess announced that the sixth and final Royal-class vessel would be Discovery Princess, then scheduled to begin operating in November 2021. The pandemic moved that debut to March 2022, as it moved almost every delivery and debut in the industry.
Naming, launch and maiden voyage
Discovery continues Princess's practice of reviving admired fleet names and pairing them with the Princess suffix; unlike the older MV Discovery — an unrelated 1971 hull that ended her career with Voyages of Discovery and Cruise & Maritime Voyages and was scrapped in 2014 — this ship carries the name as a new Royal-class flagship-generation vessel, and the two hulls should not be confused.
Career by operator
One operator and one name, from delivery to the present.
| Period | Name | Operator |
|---|---|---|
| 2022–present | Discovery Princess | Princess Cruises |
Onboard character
The Royal-class character, fully developed in this final ship, rests on three era-defining elements. The first is the Piazza: a soaring, multi-deck atrium in a European town-square idiom, with cafes, bars and street-style entertainment opening off it, in deliberate contrast to the enclosed mall-atriums of earlier large ships. The second is the SeaWalk, the glass-floored walkway extending beyond the hull's edge on the starboard side, matched on the port side by a glass-fronted bar in the class design — vertigo as a designed feature, and the most photographed element of every Royal-class ship. The third is the top-deck arrangement: a resort deck of pools and loungers, an adults-only Sanctuary retreat, and Movies Under the Stars, Princess's outdoor cinema concept, which long predates the class but reached its largest scale in it.
Princess's cabins in the final trio included the Sky Suites, the class's largest balcony suites, introduced on Sky Princess and carried into Enchanted and Discovery. Specialty dining, the theatre and the line's Medallion wearable-technology service model — a fleet programme rather than a feature of this hull's construction — complete the contemporary picture but change too readily to catalogue here. The design facts that will still describe this ship in twenty years are the Piazza, the SeaWalk and the enlarged final-trio Royal hull; those are what this section records.
Major refits and incidents
No major casualty, fire, grounding or collision involving Discovery Princess is recorded in the sources used for this guide. She is the youngest ship in this batch, in service only since 2022, and no structural refit is recorded in her article; ship databases note a 2025 refurbishment in itinerary summaries, at the level of a routine hotel refresh, and no detail beyond that is asserted here. The honest content of this section is again a sourced negative, together with the delivery-context event that did shape her early career: the COVID-19 pandemic delayed her scheduled November 2021 debut to March 2022, as recorded in the class history, without any incident to the hull herself.
Sister ships and class
The Royal class for Princess comprises Royal Princess (2013), Regal Princess (2014), Majestic Princess (2017, built with adaptations for the Chinese-speaking market), Sky Princess (2019), Enchanted Princess (2020 delivered, service from 2021) and Discovery Princess (2022). P&O Cruises' Britannia (2015) is a Royal-class ship built for the British brand to the same platform. Tonnage grew modestly across the Princess sequence, from about 142,000 GT for the first pair to 145,281 GT for the final trio in registry figures.
Discovery Princess is the sixth and final Princess ship of the class — the class article and the Princess fleet table both describe her in exactly those terms. Her successors in the Princess fleet are Sphere-class ships, a new and larger LNG design, so the Royal class is now a closed class and her position as its last ship will not change.
Fate and where she is now
Discovery Princess is in active service with Princess Cruises under her original name, IMO 9837468, status "Operating" in the dataset and "In service" in her article. No sale, rename or retirement is recorded, and none is expected to need recording for many years. Her complete historical statement is short because her life so far is short: final Royal-class ship, floated out in March 2021 during the industry's pandemic shutdown, delivered in January 2022, in service from 27 March 2022, and christened at Los Angeles that April by her four television godparents.
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cruise_ships, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_Princess