Spirit Cruises is primarily a dining cruise company that offers brunch, lunch, and dinner cruises, as well as cruises for certain holidays. These meal-centered cruises are open to the public and are regularly scheduled, but Spirit Cruises’ ships can also be chartered for private events. The company is owned by Entertainment Cruises, which operates several similar dining cruise outfits. Below we have put together a guide to Spirit Cruises which explains exactly what the company offers, and also distinguishes Spirit Cruises from companies that it can be confused with.
To start with the latter first, Spirit Cruises has no connection to the “Spirit class” of cruises ships that were built for Carnival Cruise Line and Costa Cruises, which are both owned by Carnival Corporation. The Spirit class is composed of six ships, four for Carnival (Carnival Spirit, Carnival Pride, Carnival Legend, and Carnival Miracle) and two for Costa (Costa Atlantica and Costa Mediterranea). There are also a few other ships unrelated to this class that incorporate the word “spirit” in their name – Norwegian Cruise Line’s Norwegian Spirit, for example, and there is also a ship called the Portland Spirit that coincidentally offers dining cruises – and none of these ships have any connection to Spirit Cruises either. Finally, Spirit Cruises is not related to Spirit Airlines, and this is especially worth keeping in mind since Spirit Airlines has a cruise division that is called “Spirit Cruises.” (Spirit doesn’t have a cruise line itself, but you can book cruise vacations through them.)
The Spirit Cruises that we are talking about operates in eight different cities across the United States: Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, New York, New Jersey, Norfolk, Philadelphia, and Washington DC. For reasons that only partially make sense, New York and New Jersey are grouped together by Spirit under the heading “New York Metro” and share a website, even though both of the cities have their own ship. These two ships are Spirit of New York and Spirit of New Jersey, and each city in which Spirit Cruises operates has a ship with this type of name (Spirit of Baltimore, Spirit of Boston, and so on). Since each city has more or less the same resources at its disposal, the Spirit Cruises are fairly uniform across the country. In each city, Spirit offers lunch and dinner cruises at regularly scheduled times, and in a couple of cities brunch cruises are available as well. The specialty cruises differ from city to city, although there is some overlap because Spirit offers cruises for holidays (and so you’ll find things like Valentine’s Day dinner cruises in all the cities in which Spirit operates). And in addition to these cruises, you can charter one of the Spirit ships for whatever purpose in any of the eight cities listed above.
So, to conclude, Spirit Cruises is basically a chain dining cruise company that has set up operations in eight large U.S. cities. The best way to figure out the precise offerings of a city is to visit the main Spirit Cruises website. From here you can get to the individual pages of each city, which lists the cruises offered from that location. Spirit Cruises often operates along with another company owned by Entertainment Cruises in a city, so it is worth reading our article on the conglomerate to find out if you have additional options in your location.
