Iona

Overview

Iona is an Excellence-class (Excel-class) cruise ship built for P&O Cruises, the British brand of Carnival Corporation & plc. Built by Meyer Werft at Papenburg in Germany and delivered in October 2020 at a cost of about £730 million, she measured 184,089 GT as completed and became, on delivery, the largest cruise ship ever commissioned for P&O and for the British market — a title she held until her sister Arvia arrived in 2022. She is powered by liquefied natural gas (LNG), the first LNG-powered ship dedicated to the British market, and she is named for the Scottish Hebridean island of Iona. Her entry into service was shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic: completed in the autumn of 2020, she did not carry passengers until August 2021.

Key specifications

The dataset records Iona at 184,000 GT (184,089 GT as registered), 344.5 metres in length, with IMO number 9826548 and Meyer Werft hull number S.710. The dataset's beam figure of 54.0 metres should be read with care: the ship's registered hull beam is 42 metres, and the wider figure appears to reflect an overall width measurement rather than the moulded hull beam. She has 19 decks, total installed power of 61.7 MW and propulsion power of 37 MW, giving the 17-knot service speed recorded in the dataset (some registers quote higher trial figures). Passenger capacity is 5,206 guests on the builder's figures, with a maximum of about 6,685 and a crew of 1,762. The dataset lists her maiden voyage as 2020 — the year of her completion and delivery; her actual first passenger voyage took place in August 2021, as described below, and the discrepancy is logged in the batch notes.

Design and construction

Carnival Corporation announced the order on 6 September 2016: a roughly 180,000 GT, 5,200-passenger LNG-powered ship for P&O, scheduled for a 2020 debut and planned from the outset as the largest in the line's history. Steel cutting took place at Papenburg on 25 April 2018, and the keel was laid on 29 May 2019, when a bronze coin from Iona Abbey and a piece of green Iona marble were placed beneath a 461-tonne keel block. The huge glass dome of the SkyDome — 105 tonnes, 340 panes, 970 square metres — was lifted into place in August 2019. Iona was floated out on 14 February 2020 (the infobox launch date is sometimes given as 18 February) and made her River Ems conveyance to Eemshaven in March, just as the pandemic closed in: Meyer Werft paused interior work and trials on 20 March 2020, resumed at reduced pace, and completed sea trials via Bremerhaven, a Rotterdam drydocking and a further round off Norway before delivery on 9 October 2020.

Naming, launch and maiden voyage

In October 2016 P&O invited the public to suggest a name for the new ship; from some 30,000 submissions the line chose Iona, after the small island off Mull in the Inner Hebrides, one of the historic centres of Scottish Christianity. The choice tied the largest ship in the company's history to a place of pilgrimage and quiet — a deliberate piece of British storytelling for a ship aimed squarely at the British market. The naming ceremony eventually took place at Southampton on 16 May 2021, with Dame Irene Hays as sponsor, in a ceremony fronted by performers Gary Barlow and Jo Whiley. The originally planned maiden voyage of May 2020 was abandoned with the pandemic suspension; instead Iona sailed her maiden voyage on 7 August 2021, a scenic cruise from Southampton around the Inner Hebrides, at a time when pandemic rules still kept guests aboard for the whole voyage.

Career by operator

Iona has served a single operator under a single name:

Delivered into a suspended industry, she spent her first months laid up, then debuted in the restricted "seacation" market of summer 2021 before settling into year-round operation from Southampton as the fleet's flagship-scale ship. In October 2023 she was in the area of the Heligoland ship collision in the North Sea and took part in the subsequent search operation. In January 2025 she made her first visit to the Caribbean on a long voyage from Southampton. Her registry moved from Southampton to Hamilton, Bermuda, in 2025. No change of name, owner or operator has occurred; the ship's career is that of a single-brand flagship whose first two years were consumed by the pandemic and its aftermath.

Onboard character

Iona was designed, in P&O's phrase, to bring the outside in. The defining features are the SkyDome — a pool and entertainment space capped by that enormous glass dome, with a retractable stage — and a three-deck-high central atrium whose triple-height glass panels project outward from the hull, giving the ship's social core a wall of sea view. Around those set pieces sit 17 places to eat, including eight designated select-dining restaurants, a dozen bars, four swimming pools and 16 whirlpools. The ship also introduced new cabin thinking for the line, including conservatory-style mini-suites with an extra glass-walled sitting space between cabin and balcony. The character is that of the big contemporary British cruise ship: family-capable and entertainment-led, but styled more conservatively than her American cousins, with the sea view rather than the attraction as the headline.

Major refits and incidents

The ship's early history is dominated by delay rather than refit: the pandemic halted her completion, postponed delivery from spring to October 2020, and pushed her debut back by more than a year. In February 2025 Iona suffered a norovirus outbreak during a voyage off the Belgian coast, which caused staff shortages, cancelled some onboard entertainment, and led P&O to offer full refunds to guests unable to take part in scheduled excursions because of illness. In October 2025 she underwent a scheduled drydock refurbishment at Rotterdam, returning to Southampton on 22 October. No structural incident or casualty involving the ship herself appears in the sources consulted.

Sister ships and class

Iona belongs to Carnival Corporation's Excellence class — the group's common LNG-powered platform of roughly 184,000 GT ships built by the Meyer group yards. Her direct P&O sister is Arvia (2022), marginally larger at 185,581 GT and built to the same Excel-class design for the same Southampton-based role. The wider family includes AIDAnova (2018), the world's first LNG-powered cruise ship, and Costa Smeralda (2019) from Meyer Turku, together with further Excel-class ships for Carnival Cruise Line. The class is significant less for any single vessel than for what it standardised: dual-fuel LNG propulsion, very large capacity, and a shared hull and machinery package adapted to each brand's onboard identity.

Fate and where she is now

Iona remains in active service with P&O Cruises, operating as one of the two largest ships in the fleet alongside Arvia and as the line's technological flagship by virtue of her LNG plant. The dataset lists her status simply as "Operating", and nothing in her record suggests any change: she is a young ship, barely into her first decade, whose biography so far is the story of a debut deferred — ordered in optimism in 2016, finished into a closed industry in 2020, and finally introduced to her public in the summer of 2021. Her long-term significance for the directory is as the ship that reset the scale of British cruising and brought LNG propulsion to the British market.

Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cruise_ships; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Iona; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excellence-class_cruise_ship