Surprise: Disney Cruise Line has announced the arrival of four new ships on the line in the coming years

What was arguably the most shocking announcement of the night at the Walt Disney Company’s D23 fan event last night in Anaheim, California, wasn’t about a theme park (although there were tons of those too).

Instead, we now know that Disney Cruise Line’s recent rapid expansion, where it went from the same four ships it had operated for about 10 years to a total of nine now on the water or under construction, was just the beginning.

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Disney Cruise Line to Welcome four more ships to its fleet of five currently in service and the four already announced and under construction in the coming years, bringing the size of its fleet to 13 ships by 2031.

That’s ultimately more than triple the number of ships there were on the water for many years, until Disney Wish set sail in June 2022.

Disney has announced that while the names and itineraries of the four additional ships just announced are still being worked out, it will welcome them between 2027 and 2031.

For those following along at home, the Disney Treasure will set sail later this year as the company’s sixth ship.

In 2025, two more ships will join the fleet. The Disney Destiny will sail from Port Everglades, Florida. The Disney Adventure, a massive 9,000-passenger ship that Disney Cruise Line is buying from Asia-based Dream Cruises, will sail from Singapore.

And then there’s what we thought was the ninth ship, a Tokyo-based ship that was announced just a few weeks ago and will begin construction in Germany in 2025 and set sail in 2029.

But with the just-announced schedule for four additional ships starting in 2027, it appears that at least one of those ships, if not more, will be ready before the previously announced Japan-based ship created in collaboration with Tokyo Disney’s owner Oriental Land Company.

There’s still a lot we don’t know about these four additional Disney Cruise Line ships, including their size, whether they’ll use a new or existing footprint, and where these additional ships will dock and sail. There are currently a few U.S. ports, like Galveston, that the line only serves for part of the year.

However, Josh D’Amaro, chairman of Disney Experiences, may have given a hint about the plans for at least some ships, saying, “Expanding our fleet gives more people, in more parts of the world, the opportunity to experience a vacation at sea that only Disney can.” He may have hinted that the ships will serve some areas of the globe that are new to Disney Cruise Line. For example, the line does not currently sail to or from South America, a market that is important to the line in many ways. In fact, the first D23 fan event to be held in Brazil will take place there in November.

Disney also indicated that current ships are experiencing both strong demand and high satisfaction rates, reaching 97% occupancy in the second quarter of 2024.

For comparison, Royal Caribbean currently has 28 ships. So while 13 ships would be a significantly smaller fleet than Royal Caribbean, a line that also caters to families, it would put them in a much more similar position in terms of fleet size than when there were only four ships just a few years ago.

On a conference call with investors a few days ago, a Disney executive said that cruise ships tend to “pay off very quickly,” and it’s clear that Disney is betting big on the sea and its ability to attract “travelers” to its ships for decades to come.

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