We recently wrote about the Norwegian Cruise Line and their “freestyle cruising” ways, but we didn’t cover the specific cruise ships that make up the Norwegian Cruise Line fleet. That’s why we decided to write this article; after all, what is a cruise line if not the fleet of ships that compose it?
To begin, there are a total of ten ships in the Norwegian Cruise Line fleet. In contrast to other cruise lines – for example, the cruise ships of Royal Caribbean International – the Norwegian fleet is not broken into separate classes.
All ten of the cruise ships have a name that begins with “Norwegian.” Of the ten cruise ships in the fleet, Norwegian Epic is the newest and by far the largest. Entering the fleet in 2010, the ship weighs 155,873 tons and is 1,081 feet long. The ship has a passenger capacity of 4,100 people and a crew of 1,753.
The smallest ship in the fleet, Norwegian Spirit, is barely half the size of Norwegian Epic in terms of the primary ship-measurement metrics besides length. (No matter the varying sizes of cruise ships in a fleet, the lengths tend to be somewhat similar, or at least they are more similar than the other characteristics by which ships may be compared; the wide variety of passenger capacities, weights, etc. is accounted for by the different heights of the ships.) Norwegian Spirit weighs 75,338 tons and is 881 feet long. It can hold 2,018 passengers and has a crew of 962.
The rest of the ships in the fleet obviously fall somewhere in the middle, although all of them are closer in size to Norwegian Spirit. Indeed, Norwegian Epic is a bit of an outlier, weighing 60,000 more tons than the second largest ship in the fleet, which, for the record, is Norwegian Jade. It should be noted that ship size isn’t particularly relevant for the purposes of planning a cruise (it is, however, relevant to people like us who want to know All About Cruises and More). All cruise ships are enormous relative to most other seafaring vessels, and since many of the ships in a particular cruise line’s fleet have comparable amenities, you should really only concern yourself with a cruise’s destination and itinerary when planning a trip.
For the sake of completeness, it should be noted that Norwegian Cruise Line has a sister company known as NCL America (can you guess what the “NCL” of “NCL America” stands for?) that has one cruise ship. This ship – known, appropriately enough, as Pride of America – is only slightly larger than the Norwegian Spirit. With a passenger capacity of 2,138 and a crew of 940, Pride of America weighs 80,439 tons and is 921 feet long. As an interesting side note, Pride of America is the first new U.S. flagged cruise ship in nearly 50 years.
If you would like to know more about the Norwegian Cruise Line fleet, there is a vast trove of information available on the NLC website: