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February 24, 2025

The Disney Cruise Line fleet will grow from the current six-ship line-up to an impressive number of 13 vessels by the turn of the decade. Here is an overview of the present fleet and Disney’s upcoming newbuildings from Meyer Werft.

2024 marks the year that has seen Disney Cruise Line, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company, pave the way for an unprecedented expansion that will put the company in the top league of international cruise operators in the middle-term. Beside the delivery of the Disney Treasure  in October, a quartet of vessels was ordered in August and a Wish-class vessel for Disney’s Japanese license partner Oriental Land Company in July.

Disney Magic and Disney Wonder

The Disney Magic and Disney Wonder were built at Fincantieri in Italy in 1998/99 and laid the foundation for the initial success of the Disney Cruise Line product at the turn of the century. Measuring 83,338 GT and capable of carrying 1,750 passengers (945 crew), the Panamax-sized sister ships feature Disney’s “retro” design style, the vessels boasting two funnels instead of one and their interiors trying to reminisce the art nouveau elements of the famous Atlantic liners of the 1920s and 1930s. Rated 3***+ in Douglas Ward’s latest Insight Guide Cruising and Cruise Ships, the Disney Magic and Disney Wonder introduced tailormade casino-free family-cruising out of Florida, featuring original Disney shows onboard and the popular Disney characters roaming around the decks in costumes day and night. While the Disney Magic will be cruising out of Galveston/Texas to Mexico until March 2025, she will be based in Port Everglades (Fort Lauderdale) in April to embark on a program of 3- and 4-day cruises to the Bahamas in April. The Disney Wonder is cruising in Australian waters out of Sydney and Melbourne year-round in 2025 and occasionally goes as far as New Caledonia and the Fiji Islands.

Disney Dream and Disney Fantasy

14 years after entering the market and having gained lots of first-hand experience during those years, Disney Cruise Line more than doubled its capacity with the introduction of the 129,690 GT vessels Disney Dream and Disney Fantasy in 2011/12. The post-Panamax ships were built at Meyer Werft Papenburg, Germany and marked a quantum leap in terms of both quantity and quality compared to the Italian-built Disney Magic and Disney Wonder. With the two German-built ships, Disney Cruise Line continued on its path of combining classic design with modern amenities while at the same time increasing the onboard capacity to 2,500 passengers (1,458 crew). The variety of restaurants onboard allows for a rotation so that each passenger gets to know a different venue and different Disney characters each night. With these ships, Disney also introduced “virtual bull-eyes” which display the actual sea view in the vessels’ inside staterooms. A major onboard attraction is the Aqua Duck, a 233 m long waterslide which spans over four decks. The Disney Dream is based in Port Everglades year-round in 2025 and carries out mostly 4- and 5-day cruises to Cozumel/Mexico and or the Bahamas. The Disney Fantasy is cruising the same waters until May 2025 when she will cross the Atlantic to spend the summer months in the Mediterranean where she is based in Barcelona, Civitavecchia and Southampton. In October 2025, the Disney Fantasy will return to the Eastern Caribbean.

Disney Wish, Disney Treasure and Disney Destiny

Disney Cruise Line placed an order for another pair of yet larger ships again with Meyer Werft Papenburg in 2016. (The order was extended to a trio in 2017.) Despite the increase in size to 145,281 GT, the vessels’ capacity has remained at 2,500 passengers (1,555 crew), so the greater size (15 rather than 14 decks) results in an extended range of onboard facilities for the ships’ guests. By 2016 the greater Disney family had grown to include characters from the Pixar, Marvel and Star Wars universes, too, so the possible range of themed restaurant and entertainment venues is virtually endless. In addition to amenities for the whole family, there are a lot of adult-only escapes onboard the DISNEY WISH and her sisters as well, so the ships offer something for everyone. Furthermore, the trio is LNG-powered, reducing NOX and SOX emissions considerably. The Disney Wish entered service in July 2022, the Disney Treasure in December 2024 and the Disney Destiny will follow in November 2025. The Disney Wish is calling Port Canaveral her home in 2025, sailing mostly on shorter 3- and 4-day cruises to Nassau and Disney’s private island Castaway Cay. The Disney Treasure is cruising the Eastern Caribbean as well in 2025, but goes to Mexico (Cozumel), the Cayman Islands (Georgetown) and Jamaica (Falmouth). The Disney Destiny is set to be delivered by Meyer Werft in autumn 2025 and will debut in the Caribbean with a set of 4-day short cruises from Port Everglades to both of Disney’s private islands Lookout Cay and Castaway Cay in late November 2025.

The Japanese Disney cruise liner

A fourth ship in the Disney Wish class was ordered from Meyer Werft Papenburg on 9th July 2024. However, the ship when delivered in 2028 will not sail for Disney Cruise Line directly, but for the Oriental Land Company (OLC). The latter is Disney’s longstanding Japanese partner and is managing Disney’s leisure parks in Japan on a license basis. The OLC vessel is due to enter service in early 2029 and will be tailor-made for the Japanese cruise market, reportedly being based in Tokyo. The Oriental Land Company was founded in 1960 and owns and manages the Disneyland theme park in Tokyo as well as Tokyo DisneySea, Disney’s first theme park focusing on marine motifs and elements. It also operates Disney Tokyo Resort, a hotel, retail, restaurant and entertainment complex in the Japanese capital.

Disney Adventure

Of all the Disney Cruise Line ships, the Disney Adventure has the most amazing history – before even being delivered, that is. Her story goes back to May 2016 when Genting Hongkong at 1.8 billion EUR ordered a 201,000 GT cruise ship, then planned as the Global Dream, from MV Werften. Genting had taken over that particular German shipyard with its sites in Warnemünde and Wismar only shortly before, so the vessel (and its sister ship) was built “in-house”. Adapted to the Asian cruise market where the ship would have sailed for Genting’s subsidiary Dream Cruises along the Meyer-built Genting Dream (2016) and World Dream (2017), the Global Dream was designed to carry as much as 9,500 passengers in 2,350 cabins. Construction started in March 2018 with large sections of her 342 m hull completed by summer 2019 and the hulk shipped from Warnemünde to Wismar for outfitting in November that year.

But then the Covid pandemic struck and brought work on the Global Dream to a halt. MV Werften began to suffer financial difficulties and had to file for insolvency in January 2022; Genting Hongkong and Dream Cruises followed into bankruptcy shortly afterwards, leaving the future of both the unfinished ship(s) and the yard in doubt.
It took the receivers ten months to find a solution: On 17th November 2022 it was announced that Disney Cruise Line would have the Global Dream completed on its own account and under supervision of its longstanding partner, the Meyer Werft group.

Meyer formally rented the shipyard site in Wismar on 1st August 2023 for the duration of the project. A team of 400 employees from both MV Werften and Meyer Werft was put together to turn the Global Dream into the Disney Adventure, Disney Cruise Line’s first cruise ship to be based permanently outside the United States. And Disney itself had nothing but a radical transformation in mind for the vessel. Most of the ship‘s four-berth cabins were to be rebuilt into standard two-berth staterooms, reducing the vessel’s overall capacity to 6,700 passengers (2,111 crew). Furthermore, the six conventional MAN diesel engines were to be rebuilt into dual-fuel engines, the Disney Adventure due to be converted to run climate-neutrally on e-methanol in the future.

Having reportedly acquired the unfinished Global Dream at a purchase price of just 30 million EUR, the total conversion of the vessel is estimated to cost another 1 billion EUR. At 208, 000 GT, the Disney Adventure will be the biggest passenger ship ever built in Germany when completed in May 2025. Still specifically designed for Asian guests, she will embark on her maiden cruise from Singapore’s Marina Bay cruise terminal on 15 December 2025 and will then spend, in a collaboration with the Singapore Tourism Board, her first five years of service on 3- and 4-night cruises to nowhere, not calling at any destination port at all.

On 16th October 2024, Disney Cruise Line in a “grand reveal” announced that similar to the large Royal Caribbean International ships, the Disney Adventure will be divided into seven themed areas: “Marvel Landing” (including a roller-coaster on the aft sun deck), “Toy Story Place” (a family water park on the midships sun deck), the three-deck high open-air “Disney Imagination Garden” (deemed the heart of the ship) and the “San Fransokyo Street”, “Avengers Assemble”, “Disney Discovery Reef” and “Wayfinder Bay”. Bookings for the Disney Adventure cruises opened on 3rd December 2024.

A quartet from Meyer Papenburg

However, the collaboration between Disney Cruise Line and Meyer Werft doesn’t end at two Disney Dream-class vessels, four Disney Wish-class ships and the giant Disney Adventure under construction at Meyer Wismar. On 11th August 2024, Disney Cruise Line announced the order of a quartet of cruise ships which Meyer Werft Papenburg will deliver between 2027 and 2031. No details regarding the size or design of this quartet were released for months afterwards, but on 10 January 2025 finally, Disney reveled that the order was for a fifth unit in the Disney Wish class (this time for Disney Cruise Line themselves again) and for a trio of a new, smaller class. The former (144,000 GT, 2,500/4,000 passengers) will be delivered in 2027 and the latter three between 2029 and 2031. The new class will be approximately 100,000 GT in size and have a maximum capacity for 3,000 passengers. Therefore, these ships will be smaller than Disney’s latest vessels which will allow them to call at ports the other ships can’t access easily. The trio will be equipped with multi-fuel engines as well as onboard battery systems and the latest technical equipment to use shore power when in port.

At 13 ships by the year 2031, Disney Cruise Line will have doubled its fleet size within seven years and be in the top league of international cruise lines capacity-wise by then.

Don’t miss news, updates, and reviews about Disney Cruise Line on Cruising Journal.

Kai Ortel

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