4,300 Passengers?! My Thoughts on Royal Caribbean's Discovery Class
Royal Caribbean Blog Podcast
Matt Hochberg
4.8 • 693 Ratings
🗓️ 6 May 2026
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We finally have an idea of how big the Discovery Class ships will be and Royal Caribbean ordered more ships. Matt shares his thoughts on what both mean to passengers.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Well, there were two big Royal Caribbean ship news in the last week that I wanted to talk about, |
| 0:05.5 | and chief among them, the Discovery Class. |
| 0:07.4 | Royal Caribbean hasn't made any formal announcements, but as part of their earnings filings with the SEC, |
| 0:13.8 | which they're required to do because they're a publicly traded company, |
| 0:16.6 | they disclose the approximate berths for the Discovery Class ships. |
| 0:21.2 | So this is really our first look at how big these new ships are going to be. |
| 0:25.7 | Remember, the Discovery Class is the new class ships. |
| 0:27.9 | It comes out in 2029 and 2032. |
| 0:30.3 | Those are the first two ships that have been ordered. |
| 0:32.4 | They're unnamed currently. |
| 0:34.7 | And Railroad Caribbean really hasn't said much about them other than they're a new class |
| 0:39.5 | and they'll be smaller than the icon class. Now, we've done podcast episodes about this in the past |
| 0:44.2 | here talking about what we think it'll be. And now we probably know that it's going to be what I |
| 0:51.7 | going to get myself credit on this one. It's going to be not as small as people would have imagined or hoped for because, |
| 0:58.0 | and we'll get into that a second. Anyway, the approximate births is 4,300. |
| 1:02.4 | And now remember, births are passengers on board, and that assumes double occupancy. |
| 1:07.7 | So if the ship only had two people in every cabin on board, it would have |
| 1:12.6 | 4,300, which puts it a little bit bigger than freedom of the seas and just about the size of |
| 1:20.9 | Odyssey of the Seas in terms of capacity. We don't know what the ship looks like. We don't know the |
| 1:26.4 | dimensions, how big, tall, wide, anything like that. All we know is the approximate passenger capacity. Now, before you all get your pitchforks and lanterns out, I mean, actually this won't solve that problem, but I was going to say is that the approximate births are not necessarily indicative of anything. |
| 1:44.3 | In fact, when the icon class were first ordered, |
| 1:47.6 | the size was different initially until later on, |
... |
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