| IMO | 9614141 |
|---|---|
| Gross tonnage | 144,216 GT |
| Length | 330.0 m |
| Beam | 38.4 m |
| Passenger capacity (double) | 3560 |
| Passenger capacity (max) | 3560 |
| Builder | Fincantieri |
| Yard | Monfalcone |
| Hull number | 6232 |
| Launched | 2016 |
| Maiden voyage | 2017 |
| Class | Royal-class cruise ship |
| Operator | Princess Cruises |
| Status | Active |
Overview
Majestic Princess is the third ship of Princess Cruises' Royal class, and the most culturally specific large cruise ship of her generation: she was designed and built for the Chinese-speaking market, homeported initially at Shanghai, and given a Chinese name — Sheng Shi Gong Zhu Hao, rendered by Princess as meaning "Grand World" or "Grand Spirit" — alongside her English one. She was also the first Princess newbuild to carry the line's modern SeaWitch livery on her bow.
She is in most respects a standard Royal-class ship — a sister to Royal Princess and Regal Princess, built by Fincantieri at Monfalcone in Italy — and in a handful of deliberate respects she is not. Those differences, made for a market Princess then expected to grow for decades, are what make her historically interesting now that she has long since been redeployed to serve English-speaking markets like every other ship in the class.
Two figures deserve a note. The dataset gives her tonnage as 144,216 GT, matching her article's registered figure; Princess's own ship-facts page gives 143,700 — a variant logged in the batch notes. The dataset gives her launch year as 2017; she was in fact launched on 8 February 2016, and 2017 is her delivery and entry-into-service year. The prose below follows the researched chronology.
Key specifications
Majestic Princess measures 144,216 GT on the dataset and article figure, 330.0 metres long with a beam of 38.4 metres, a height of 68.3 metres and a draught of 8.55 metres, across 19 decks. Princess's own fact sheet agrees on length, height and breadth, and gives a maximum speed of 22 knots and 1,780 guest cabins. The dataset's capacity figure of 3,560 is the number Princess itself publishes — but Princess labels it guest capacity at lower berths, that is, double occupancy, not a maximum; the dataset records it in its maximum-capacity field, a labelling discrepancy logged in the notes. She is Bermuda-registered, at Hamilton, and owned within Carnival Corporation & plc, Princess's parent group.
Design and construction
The Royal class was Princess's step into the over-140,000 GT generation. Ordered from Fincantieri, the class introduced the SeaWalk — a glass-floored walkway cantilevered beyond the ship's side, high above the sea — a large central Piazza atrium in the Italian manner, and a top-deck water-and-light show. Majestic Princess, ordered on 30 July 2014 as the third unit, was laid down at Monfalcone on 10 July 2015 under yard number 6232, launched on 8 February 2016, and completed and delivered in 2017 — acquired by Princess on 30 March 2017.
Onto that standard platform, Princess layered a China-specific design programme. Signage and announcements reflected her intended market, and venues were adapted or added for Chinese guests, including a Chinese speciality restaurant, Harmony, a French restaurant, La Mer, associated with a Michelin-starred chef, private karaoke suites, and a large luxury shopping area aimed at a market then known for onboard retail spending. She was, as Princess and contemporary reporting put it, the first ship in the fleet designed specifically for China.
Naming, launch and maiden voyage
The name continues Princess's practice of reviving names from its own past, within a class whose lead ship revived Royal Princess. Her distinctiveness was in her second name: the Chinese characters on her hull and her Chinese identity were part of the ship, not a marketing gloss. She was sponsored by the former basketball players Yao Ming and Ye Li — Yao being China's most famous basketball export — and christened on 9 July 2017, after she had already entered service; her maiden voyage had begun on 4 April 2017. That order of events — revenue service first, formal christening in her intended home market later — itself underlines how completely the ship's introduction was oriented towards China.
Career by operator
Majestic Princess has had a single operator and a single name. What has changed, dramatically, is the market she serves: built for China, she was redeployed as Princess's China ambitions were scaled back and as the pandemic reshaped Asian cruising, and she went on to serve Australia, New Zealand and North American programmes in the manner of a conventional Royal-class ship. The itinerary detail is deliberately not reproduced here; the operator history is simple.
| Period | Name | Operator | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2017–present | Majestic Princess | Princess Cruises | Third Royal-class ship; delivered 30 March 2017; maiden voyage 4 April 2017; christened 9 July 2017; built for the Chinese-speaking market, subsequently redeployed internationally |
Onboard character
The era-defining character of Majestic Princess is the meeting of two design languages. The first is the Royal-class house style: the Piazza as social centre, Movies Under the Stars on the pool deck, the SeaWalk and its companion SeaView bar, and a conservatory and indoor pool club at the forward end of the top decks that gave the class an unusually elaborate sheltered space. The second is the China layer described above — karaoke suites, tea culture, high-end retail and restaurants conceived for Chinese tastes.
After her redeployment, that second layer was progressively thinned out. Contemporary reporting on her Australian service noted, for example, that six private karaoke rooms had been reduced to one, with space reassigned to spa and internet functions, and food and beverage offers revised for local tastes. The ship that resulted is best understood as a Royal-class vessel with an unusually international set of bones — French, Italian, American and Chinese influences all present in the original design — rather than as a Chinese ship operating elsewhere.
Major refits and incidents
No major casualty or serious incident involving Majestic Princess is recorded in the sources consulted for this guide. Her material history is one of adaptation rather than repair: the conversion work associated with her move away from the China market, described above, and the routine drydock cycle of a large modern cruise ship. Her class's early history is inevitably shadowed by the COVID-19 pandemic, which struck the Princess fleet most famously through her older fleetmate Diamond Princess in 2020; no ship-specific Majestic Princess incident from that period is asserted here, because none was verified in the sources used. That distinction matters: a directory that invents a refit or an outbreak for a ship that did not have one would be worse than one that honestly records none found.
Sister ships and class
The Royal class grew to six ships: Royal Princess (2013), Regal Princess (2014), Majestic Princess (2017), Sky Princess (2019), Enchanted Princess (2021) and Discovery Princess (2022), all built by Fincantieri in Italy. At over 140,000 GT the class made Princess, for the first time, the operator of some of the largest cruise ships in the world, and the design also underlies P&O Cruises' Britannia, a close derivative built for the British market. Majestic Princess sits in the middle of the class chronologically and is its clearest example of market-specific design: her sisters were built as international ships; she was built as a Chinese one, and then became an international ship anyway.
Fate and where she is now
Majestic Princess is in active service with Princess Cruises, as both the dataset and her article record. Her historical fate, in the sense that matters for a directory, is already written: she is the surviving physical evidence of the mid-2010s moment when Western cruise lines believed China would become the world's largest cruise market, and built accordingly. The market did not develop as forecast, the ship outlasted the strategy, and she continues — renamed never, rebranded only in detail — as a mainstream Royal-class vessel.
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cruise_ships plus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majestic_Princess and https://www.princess.com/learn/ships/mj/amenities_publicrooms/ship_facts/