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Broadcasting from the Tripinsurance.com studios in Jacksonville, Florida.

This is Cruise Radio.

Hey, what's up?

My name is Doug Parker.

Thank you so much for being here.

Very happy to have you.

Coming up on this week's episode, we'll get a review of Royal Princess from Eric. He did a Royal Princess in Northern Europe sailing, so looking forward to hearing Eric's review. A couple of things here before we get to Cruise News. First off, Cruise Radio Insider Facebook group. If you're not a member, look it up and join us. A lot of great cruise conversation happening there. I'll also link to it in the show notes at cruise radio.net. Also, I'd like to invite you to check out our cruise radio news segment on every single one of our news articles right there at cruise radio.net. Basically, what I'm doing here is putting a soundbibite of the news story on top of the article,

kind of like NPR does, so you can listen to the article if you don't want to read it. So if you're lazy or don't want to read or just don't have the time to read, or if you're driving, it's a good resource there. So with that said, Theresa Norton Massick is on the line from TravelPulse.com. It's been a really slow cruise newsweek,

Theresa, but Costa Cruises orders these two massive ships, and so massive the passenger count exceeds

Royal Caribbean, but the ships aren't that big. Talk to us about this. Yeah, that's right. It's

pretty interesting what they're going to do here. These two new Costa ships will accommodate a maximum of 6,600 passengers, which parent company

Carnival Corp says is the world's largest passenger capacity on a cruise ship at this time.

However, the ships are only 180,000 gross registered tons.

And compare that to Royal Caribbean's Oasis-class ships. They're a lot

bigger in size, and the gross-registered tonnage is a measure of size, not weight. So the Oasis-class ships

are 225,000 tons, and they accommodate 6,400 passengers. So they're bigger ships with fewer passengers.

Carnival's going to have smaller ships with more passengers,

but they say they can do this through a new design

that's going to make more efficient use of the ship's facilities.

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