Any time of year is great for a tropical vacation, especially if you’re like me and you live somewhere where skies can be gray for months at a time, but the winter is an especially fine time to take a cruise somewhere tropical. Though MSC is headquartered in landlocked Switzerland, this cruise line has mastered the art of mega-ships, building four of the 20 largest in the world: MSC Bellissima, MSC Meraviglia, MSC Seaview , and MSC Seaside, each can hold between 5,300 and 5,700 passengers at maximum capacity.
Seabourn’s five ships feature fewer than 300 suites each—but they leverage that small size into access at some of the world’s most beloved yacht ports: St. Tropez in the south of France; the Greek island of Kos; and popular large ports like Dubrovnik and Monte Carlo.
The largest cruise lines in the world in terms of number of annual passengers (more than five million) as well as fleet count, it has 26 ships that sail North America and Europe, with about half of them having a capacity between 2,500 and 3,900 guests.
Some lines use their name as a prefix or suffix in the ship name (such as the prefixes ” Carnival “, ” AIDA “, ” Disney “, and ” Norwegian ” and the suffix ” Princess “). Other lines use a unique word or phrase (such as the prefix of “Pacific” for P& Cruises Australia or the suffixes “of the Seas” for Royal Caribbean International and “-dam” for ships of the Holland America Line ). The addition of these prefixes and suffixes allows multiple cruise lines to use the same popular ship names while maintaining a unique identifier for each ship.
As the veranda suites were particularly lucrative for cruise lines, something which was lacking in older ocean liners, recent cruise ships have been designed to maximize such amenities and have been described as “balcony-laden floating condominiums”.