Disney and Royal Caribbean Are Both Building Smaller Ships Now
For fifteen years the headline out of every cruise line has been the same. Bigger. Roller coasters at sea, full water parks, Broadway shows in real theaters. For a lot of people that has been great news, and I have enjoyed covering all of it.
That run may be turning. I came home from D23 with a stack of parks news I am excited about, but the cruise announcement was the one worth sitting with. Disney is building three new ships that land between the Magic class and the Dream class. Royal Caribbean announced its own smaller Discovery class back in January. Two companies that spent a decade competing on scale just placed orders going the other direction.
What Disney announced at D23 2026
At the Disney Experiences Showcase, Disney revealed a new class of ship: roughly 100,000 gross tons, about 3,000 guests at double occupancy, and three hulls ordered from Meyer Werft in Papenburg.
Disney has not named the class yet, and the official blog post held back nearly every specification, saying the details are still locked away. What did come out is the delivery schedule, and it has moved up since the original contract. Two ships arrive in 2029, one early and one late, with the third following in late 2030. Disney reaches thirteen ships by the end of 2030 rather than 2031.
Claire Weiss from Walt Disney Imagineering put the positioning plainly at the showcase, saying the ships sit right between the classic ships and the newer ones, opening up new places to visit and new audiences to reach.
The concept art is worth a look. A three-deck glass promenade runs down the middle of the ship, a black and gold hull, two funnels. The teaser language ran toward speed, fluidity, and lightweight design. On the propulsion side, these ships move away from the LNG setup on the Wish class toward battery systems, shore power, and the flexibility to run on hydrotreated vegetable oil or renewable methanol.
Where the new Disney class fits in the fleet
The numbers make the positioning obvious.
Disney Magic and Disney Wonder come in at 83,338 and 83,969 gross tons, carrying 1,750 guests at double occupancy. Disney Dream and Disney Fantasy are 129,690 tons at 2,500 guests. Disney Wish is 144,000 tons and carries 2,508 at double occupancy, climbing toward 4,000 with every berth filled.
A 100,000-ton ship carrying 3,000 people sits in a genuine gap. Roughly twenty percent larger than the Magic class, comfortably below the Dream and Wish. My Disney ships-by-size breakdown has the full comparison if you want the whole fleet side by side.
One thing I said in the video needs a correction. Fincantieri built the Magic and the Wonder in Italy, which is right. But Meyer Werft has not built every Disney ship since the Dream. Disney Adventure started life as Genting's Global Dream at MV Werften in Rostock. After that yard went bankrupt, Meyer Werft oversaw the completion at the former MV Werften facility in Wismar. Every other post-Dream ship is genuinely Meyer Werft.
Why Disney Cruise Line is building smaller ships
Three reasons, and the third one is mine rather than Disney's.
Ports
A smaller ship goes more places. Big ships are locked into a shortlist of harbors deep enough and long enough to take them, and that list has been getting shorter rather than longer as destinations push back on volume. A 100,000-ton hull also fits the Panama Canal, which means a ship can reposition between the Caribbean and Alaska instead of living in one ocean.
I used Key West as an on-camera example, and that one does not hold up. Key West voters did pass limits in 2020, but the Florida legislature preempted them in 2021, and in 2024 the state approved a 25-year lease that widens and lengthens the Pier B berth specifically to handle larger ships. Key West is more open to big ships now, not less.
The better examples are elsewhere. Bar Harbor's 1,000-passenger daily cap survived a court challenge only for July and August, and its cruise volume has fallen from roughly 182,000 passengers in 2024 to an expected 50,000 this year. Juneau agreed to a daily limit of 16,000 lower berths on weekdays and 12,000 on Saturdays starting this year. Amsterdam capped sea cruise calls at 100 a year from 2026 and requires shore power from 2027. A December decree covering Cannes, Nice, Villefranche and Menton limits large-ship calls to fifteen a month in July and August. Santorini holds at 8,000 cruise passengers a day. Venice has barred anything over 25,000 gross tons from the Giudecca Canal since 2021. Mexico's per-passenger fee went from $5 to $10 this month and steps up again in 2027 and 2028.
None of that stops a mega ship from sailing. It does make a versatile mid-size hull look like a smarter twenty-year asset.
Design
I love the Magic and the Wonder for feeling like ocean liners from the 1920s and 1930s. This new class is going somewhere else, with far more glass and a promenade built around views rather than interior spectacle. Whether that lands well is a question for the reveals, and I am not calling it either way yet.
Replacement
This is speculation on my part, rt and I want to label it as such. The Magic and the Wonder are approaching thirty years old. They are paid off and still earning, but maintenance costs on an aging hull climb every year. I suspect these three ships are eventually the successors, which would mean the fleet touches thirteen and then settles back rather than holding there. Disney has said nothing to support that. It is a hunch from watching how lines handle old tonnage.
The Disney Believe
The near-term news was good too. Disney Believe, the fourth Wish-class ship, comes from Meyer Werft in late 2027.
The Grand Hall gets a Moana theme, with a bronze statue of Moana alongside Pua and Heihei in place of the usual character, finished with Polynesian detailing. On the stern, Woody and Buzz Lightyear are drawn writing the ship's name in large yellow crayons, so the lettering breaks from the looped script Disney has used on every previous hull. The bow belongs to Tinker Bell, with hand-painted filigree and silhouettes of Peter, Wendy and Hook. I had the stern right on camera and skipped the bow.
None of that is major news in the scheme of a cruise line, but the typeface change is the kind of detail that tells you the design team is willing to break a pattern. Restaurants, bars and show details are still to come, with a fuller reveal set for a livestream from Disney Wish on October 7.
Disney Cruise Line doubles down on San Diego.
The San Diego news actually predates D23. Back in April, the Port of San Diego announced an extended homeport partnership with Disney running through at least 2031, roughly doubling the number of Disney sailings out of the city each year.
Disney Magic runs three- to seven-night voyages from October 2026 through November, then repositions on a fourteen-night Panama Canal transit. Disney Wonder covers October 2026 through April 2027 on three- to seven-night itineraries. The port also secured a minimum annual guarantee of more than a million Disney passengers across the agreement, which it says is the first such guarantee it has taken from any cruise line in over twenty years.
Good news for the West Coast, which has been thin on Disney options. I have a full tour of the Disney Magic on the site, and I am getting on the Wonder before long.
Royal Caribbean's Discovery class is the same bet.
Royal Caribbean got there first. Royal Caribbean announced the Discovery class on January 29 of this year: two firm orders with options for four more, built by Chantiers de l'Atlantique in Saint-Nazaire rather than Meyer Turku, with the first arriving in late 2029 and the second in the second quarter of 2032.
Royal Caribbean still has not published a gross tonnage. Capacity surfaced in the company's quarterly SEC filing at roughly 4,300 guests. That figure reflects double occupancy rather than the full number, which corrects what I said in the video. Maximum capacity will be meaningfully higher.
Michael Bayley confirmed in July that the class is small enough for the Panama Canal, which lets Royal Caribbean move these hulls between Alaska and the Caribbean efficiently. Jason Liberty framed the order this way in the announcement: "These ships will be a showcase of what's possible when design meets purpose, ultimately bringing the world closer to our guests."
Read the two fleets together, and the split gets clear. Icon and Oasis are resorts at sea, sold on what is happening on board. Discovery takes the pieces of that experience that travel well and puts them on a hull that can reach places Icon never will. My Oasis class versus Icon class comparison covers how big the flagships actually got, and the Star of the Seas review shows what the top of that range delivers today.
If you are weighing Disney against Royal Caribbean for a family sailing, that comes up in almost every conversation I have with clients, and the answer usually turns on itinerary rather than hardware. Get a free quote,e and I will lay out both.
Is the mega ship era over?
No, and I want to be careful here because I got this one wrong on camera too.
I said Royal Caribbean is teasing a ship a bit larger than Icon of the Seas. Nono confirmed no order for anything bigger. In April, Royal Caribbean ordered a sixth and seventh Icon-class ship, taking that class to seven hulls delivering through 2030, all built to the same specification of roughly 250,800 gross tons and 7,600 maximum guests. Individual hulls measure fractionally differently, which is how Star came in slightly above Icon, but that is measurement variance inside one class rather than a new larger design.
So the biggest ships keep coming. What has changed is that both companies now think the next decade needs two products, not one.
On the Disney Adventure, I floated a rumor that Disney is trying to end the Singapore deployment early. I looked for a source afterward and could ’t find one. The commitment with the Singapore Tourism Board is five years, running to at least early 2031, and around thirty sailings are on the schedule from October through January. Two real stories are probably feeding that rumor: an engine failure in May that canceled a sailing after guests had boarded, and Disney's cancellation of its 2026-27 Australia and New Zealand season, which is a different market entirely. Treat the Singapore rumor as unsourced until something happens.
The parks news worth knowing for a cruise trip
Quickly, because it affects anyone adding days at Walt Disney World around a Port Canaveral sailing.
Tropical Americas opens at Animal Kingdom in 2027, in phases, with Indiana Jones and the Myth of the Jade Serpent and Antonio's Fiesta de Encanto confirmed. And Thomas Mazloum announced that Disney is bringing the Yeti back to life on Expedition Everest, which has been stuck in strobe-lit B mode for close to twenty years. Reports of specific closure dates are fan speculation , notanything Disney has said.
What this means if you are booking a cruise
Nothing on order changes a sailing you book in the next two years. The first of these smaller ships is three years out on both lines.
What does change is inventory. Disney adding ships has already softened near-term pricing, which is unusual for a line that historically held firm, and there are real deals on 2026 sailings if your dates are flexible. That will not last forever.
And if the thing you actually want out of a cruise is the destination rather than the ship, both of these classes are being built for you. That has not been true of a new-build announcement in a long time.
I wrote up the broader case for where Disney thinks travel is heading before the event, and most of it held up.
We plan 2026, 2027, or later cruises at the agency, at no cost to you beyond the fare. Send me your dates.
