| IMO | 9169550 |
|---|---|
| Gross tonnage | 77,000 GT |
| Length | 260.0 m |
| Beam | 32.0 m |
| Passenger capacity (max) | 2272 |
| Service speed | 22.0 knots |
| Builder | Fincantieri |
| Hull number | 6044 |
| Launched | 1999 |
| Maiden voyage | 2000 |
| Operator | Seajets |
| Status | Laid up |
| All names | Queen of the Oceans; Oceana; Ocean Princess |
Overview
This ship's dataset record is the most seriously out of date in this batch, and the guide is written to the corrected facts. The hull recorded here as Oceana, in active service for P&O Cruises, in fact left the P&O fleet in July 2020, was sold to the Greek operator Seajets, was renamed Queen of the Oceans, and has never re-entered service since — she has remained laid up in Greece, and was listed for sale in 2026. Her full career runs: Ocean Princess for Princess Cruises from 2000, Oceana for P&O Cruises from 2002 to 2020, and Queen of the Oceans in lay-up from 2020. The dataset's "launched: 2003" is also wrong — 2003 was the year of her Southampton naming ceremony as Oceana; she was built at Fincantieri's Monfalcone yard as hull 6044 and entered service on 16 February 2000.
She is a member of Princess Cruises' Sun class, the quartet of roughly 77,000 GT ships that defined that line's fleet at the turn of the century, and for eighteen years she was one of the most familiar ships in the British market.
Key specifications
Her ship article — under her present name, Queen of the Oceans — and fleet listings give a tonnage of about 77,499 GT in her later measurement, against the dataset's rounded 77,000; a length of about 261 metres against the dataset's 260.0; and a beam of 32 metres, matching the dataset. Her article-era capacity is about 2,016 passengers at double occupancy and up to about 2,419 at maximum, with a crew of about 870; the dataset's maximum of 2,272 is another counting variant. She has 14 decks in most listings. Her builder was Fincantieri at Monfalcone, Italy — the dataset says only "Fincantieri" — and her yard number, 6044, is Monfalcone's.
Design and construction
The Sun class — Sun Princess, Dawn Princess, Sea Princess and this ship — was Princess Cruises' standard large-ship design of the late 1990s, built by Fincantieri at Monfalcone at roughly 77,000 GT with a high proportion of balcony cabins for the era, a wraparound promenade, and a layout that transferred readily between the Princess and P&O brands within the P&O Princess group. This hull was ordered by P&O for the Princess fleet and built as the fourth of the class. She was launched at Monfalcone in 1999 and completed at the start of 2000, at a reported cost of about $300 million in commercial listings.
The transferability built into the design was soon used: within three years of delivery the ship had moved brands without any structural change, a pattern the class repeated across the Carnival group for two decades.
Naming, launch and maiden voyage
She entered service as Ocean Princess on 16 February 2000, named by the actors Ali MacGraw and Ryan O'Neal — the stars of Love Story, chosen in a piece of Princess brand theatre. In November 2002 she transferred to the British P&O Cruises fleet as Oceana, and her formal naming for her new brand took place at Southampton on 21 May 2003, performed by Anne, Princess Royal. That 2003 ceremony, not any launch, is the source of the dataset's erroneous launch year. The name Oceana slotted into P&O's fleet nomenclature alongside Aurora, Oriana and later Arcadia, Ventura and Azura.
Career by operator
| Period | Name | Operator |
|---|---|---|
| 2000–2002 | Ocean Princess | Princess Cruises |
| 2002–2020 | Oceana | P&O Cruises |
| 2020–present | Queen of the Oceans | Seajets — never entered service; laid up in Greece |
Her Princess career was brief: two years divided, in the pattern of her class, between Caribbean winters and Alaska summers. Her P&O career was the substance of her life — eighteen years as a mainstream British-market ship, for much of that time the fleet's family-orientated, informal option, based at Southampton for long periods. In 2003 her ownership passed to Carnival UK when P&O Princess merged with Carnival Corporation. On 7 July 2020, in the depths of the pandemic shutdown, P&O announced her sale to an undisclosed buyer. She was delivered to Seajets at Patras on 21 July 2020 and renamed Queen of the Oceans, the Union flag on her bow painted over. Seajets, a Greek fast-ferry operator that bought several laid-up cruise ships in 2020, never put her into service.
Onboard character
As built, the Sun class offered the Princess formula of its day: a grand atrium, multiple dining rooms enabling a choice of seating styles, a two-level show lounge, and extensive open deck and pool space for the Caribbean and Alaska programmes she was built to alternate. Under P&O she was repositioned as the fleet's relaxed family ship, and her interiors were progressively anglicised in tone and content across two decades of refits while the architecture — atrium-centred, promenade-wrapped, balcony-heavy — stayed that of a 1990s Princess newbuild. That dual identity is her historical interest: a hull whose public rooms carried two national cruise cultures in succession without ever being rebuilt.
Major refits and incidents
Her last major refit as Oceana ran from 29 November to 17 December 2017 at Blohm+Voss in Hamburg, a £31 million programme of technical work and public-area refurbishment — the renewal that was expected to carry her through the 2020s with P&O, until the pandemic ended her career with the line less than three years later. No major casualty involving the ship in any of her identities is recorded in the sources used for this guide. Since 2020 her only "works" have been those of lay-up: she has remained in Greece, in the Patras and later Elefsina-area anchorages reported in ship-tracking coverage, deteriorating slowly as an unemployed hull.
Sister ships and class
The Sun class comprises Sun Princess (1995, later Pacific World of Peace Boat), Dawn Princess (1997, later sailing as Charming), Sea Princess (1998, which also spent a period as P&O's Adonia before returning to Princess, and later sailed as Dream) and this ship. All four were Fincantieri Monfalcone builds of the same design. The class's afterlife is a map of the second-hand market: Peace Boat, Chinese and Greek owners, and long lay-ups — with this hull's Greek lay-up among the longest and least resolved.
Fate and where she is now
She lies in Greece as Queen of the Oceans, out of service since July 2020 — not an active P&O ship as the dataset records, and the discrepancy is logged as a dataset error in this batch's notes. Her ship article records that as of August 2026 she had never re-entered service since her sale, and that in September 2026 she was listed for sale at an asking price of US$95 million. Whether a buyer returns a 2000-built, six-years-idle ship to cruising, converts her, or sends her to the breakers, is unresolved. For now she is a Sun-class hull in limbo: sold in a pandemic, renamed for a service that never began, and still waiting.
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cruise_ships, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Queen_of_the_Oceans