| IMO | 9839399 |
|---|---|
| Gross tonnage | 114,188 GT |
| Length | 322.51 m |
| Beam | 35.6 m |
| Builder | Fincantieri |
| Hull number | 6274 |
| Launched | 2023 |
| Maiden voyage | 2024 |
| Operator | Cunard Line |
| Status | Active |
Overview
Queen Anne is the fourth ship of Cunard Line's present fleet and the line's first new ship in fourteen years, delivered by Fincantieri in April 2024 and entering service on 3 May 2024. She is Cunard's 249th ship in the count the line itself uses, named for Anne, Queen of Great Britain (reigned 1702–1714), and at about 114,000 GT she is the second-largest ship in the fleet, after Queen Mary 2. The dataset's launch year, 2024, is her service year: she was floated out at Fincantieri's Marghera yard on 24 April 2023, a distinction her guide prose restores. The dataset leaves her tonnage and beam blank; her ship article gives 114,188 GT and a beam of 35.6 metres, and a length of 322.51 metres against the dataset's 322.15 — a small measurement variant, logged in this batch's notes.
In October 2026 — the month of this directory's dataset freeze — Carnival Corporation announced that Queen Anne will leave Cunard in 2029, after her 2028–29 world voyage, to be renamed and join P&O Cruises. That announced future, remarkable for a ship barely two years old, closes this guide.
Key specifications
Her ship article gives 114,188 GT (some Cunard fleet listings round the design to about 113,000 GT), a length of 322.51 metres, a beam of 35.60 metres, and a maximum capacity of 3,000 passengers — about 2,996 at double occupancy in line material, with a crew of about 1,225. Her power plant is four Caterpillar-MaK 12V43C diesel engines driving two ABB Azipods. She is registered at Hamilton, Bermuda, in line with the rest of the Cunard fleet since 2011. Her yard number at Marghera was 6274, matching the dataset, and her reported build cost was about US$600 million.
Design and construction
Queen Anne is a development of the Pinnacle-class platform Fincantieri built for Holland America Line — the dataset leaves her class blank; her article describes her as a Pinnacle series ship, an extended variant sometimes styled the Halifax class in secondary sources. Announced in September 2017 as Cunard's fourth current ship, she was originally due in 2022; the pandemic pushed her back two years. Her keel was laid at Marghera, near Venice, on 5 October 2022, and she was floated out on 24 April 2023. Sea trials followed, and Cunard took delivery on 19 April 2024. She arrived at her homeport of Southampton on 30 April 2024.
The design brief was continuity with a twist: a ship recognisably Cunard — black hull, red funnel, formal-dress tradition, the Queens Room ballroom and the Grills suite-class system — built on a standard Carnival-group platform shared with a sister brand, with interiors by a team of designers working to evoke the line's 1930s golden age in contemporary form.
Naming, launch and maiden voyage
Her name was announced on 8 February 2022: Queen Anne, honouring the monarch on whose watch the Acts of Union created Great Britain — a name no Cunard ship had carried. She departed Southampton on her maiden voyage on 3 May 2024, a sailing to Lisbon via A Coruña in her article's account (line material describes the maiden programme as a Canary Islands voyage via Lisbon ). Her formal naming ceremony came a month into service, on 3 June 2024 at Liverpool — Cunard's spiritual home port — where the city of Liverpool itself was named as her godparent, an unusual collective honour reflecting the line's founding ties to the Mersey.
Career by operator
| Period | Name | Operator |
|---|---|---|
| 2024–present | Queen Anne | Cunard Line |
| From 2029 (announced) | New name to be announced | P&O Cruises (announced transfer) |
Her Cunard career to date is that of a new flagship settling into the line's established pattern — Southampton-based seasons, transatlantic crossings alongside Queen Mary 2, and a first world voyage in 2025. The October 2026 Carnival announcement reframes that career as a five-year engagement: Queen Anne is to complete her 2028–29 world voyage as a Cunarder, then undergo an extensive redesign, be renamed, and enter P&O Cruises service in May 2029 — while P&O's Arcadia moves in turn to Holland America Line. Fleet shuffles of this kind are a Carnival-group habit, but moving a purpose-branded Cunard flagship after five years is without recent precedent, and it makes her Cunard identity a deliberately time-limited one.
Onboard character
Queen Anne's character is an essay in managed tradition. The platform is a modern volume ship, but the interior programme layers Cunard signifiers over it: the two-level Queens Room for afternoon tea and evening dancing, the Commodore Club forward, the Chart Room and Churchill's cigar lounge, the Royal Court Theatre, white-glove service rituals, and the class system's survival in the Queens Grill and Princess Grill restaurants and suites for top-grade guests, with Britannia dining for the rest. New spaces for the ship — a wellness pavilion and reworked top-deck areas — were presented at launch as her modernising layer. The design argument of the ship is that Cunard's product is a set of rituals and rooms that can be installed on any competent modern hull — an argument her announced 2029 rebranding will test from the other direction, when the same hull is asked to become a P&O ship.
Major refits and incidents
No major refit applies: she is a new ship, and her first scheduled drydock renewals lie in the future. No major incident involving Queen Anne is recorded in the sources used for this guide. Her early-career disruptions were those of the whole industry in the 2020s — a two-year pandemic delay before she was even launched — rather than anything specific to the hull.
Sister ships and class
Within Cunard she has no true sister: she is a one-off adaptation. Her platform relatives are Holland America Line's Pinnacle-class ships Koningsdam, Nieuw Statendam and Rotterdam, built by Fincantieri at Marghera to the design Queen Anne extends. Her fleetmates — Queen Mary 2, a true ocean liner of 2004, and the Vista-class pair Queen Victoria (2007) and Queen Elizabeth (2010) — are all unrelated designs, which makes the modern Cunard fleet a collection of singletons unified by brand rather than by naval architecture. She is, in that sense, the fleet's pattern in its purest form.
Fate and where she is now
Queen Anne is in active Cunard service, as the dataset records — a new flagship with an announced expiry date on her own brand. If Carnival's October 2026 plan proceeds, she will sail her final Cunard world voyage in 2028–29, be redesigned and renamed, and join P&O Cruises in May 2029, ending the shortest flagship career in modern Cunard history. The hull, of course, will be barely five years into a thirty-year design life: what changes in 2029 is the name on the stern, the funnel colour's meaning, and the rituals inside — the ship herself sails on.
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cruise_ships, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Queen_Anne