Is Crown Princess Australia’s favourite ship? She has already sold out 21 cruises this season

• Crown Princess has been selling out its 2025/26 season rapidly, with 21 of 30 itineraries already gone.
• This is more than any other Princess ship, with the next closest being Diamond Princess, with eight itineraries sold out.
• The reason? Crown is the only large ship in Australia that is operating out of different regions including Adelaide, Hobart and Melbourne – and they are already full for the year.

You could say she earns the crown as Australia’s most popular ship. From now until the Crown Princess finishes its Australian season in April, she has already sold out a massive 21 itineraries.

Over the same period, the next falling selling Princess ship is Diamond Princess, which has sold out eight cruises, no other ship has sold out more than two. 

This makes Crown Princess by far the fastest-selling Princess ship, and likely one of, if not the, fastest-selling cruise ship in the world. It’s not very common for cruise ships to completely book out, as similar to airlines, they employ dynamic pricing, meaning that prices rise greatly when there are only a few cabins available. 

From now until April, 21 out of a total 30 cruises are sold out. Of the nine remaining, seven are already sold out of suites and the majority have multiple cabin categories already sold out, suggesting they could well sell out soon.

This is also particularly notable because this season in Australia, Crown Princess, which entered service in 2006, will share Aussie waters with Discovery Princess, a relatively new ship that entered service in 2022 and is coming to Australia for the first time this season.

While you might expect this to mean that Aussies would flock to the new ship, Discovery Princess has sold out one cruise so far for the season ahead, and it’s the repositioning cruise from Singapore to Australia, rather than a cruise leaving out of Australia.

While it may seem hard to explain why there’s so much fanfare for Crown Princess and why its current season has been selling out so rapidly, there’s one theory that explains it quite well.

Over recent years, the Aussie cruise industry has seen a huge decline in sailings out of Aussie cities that aren’t Brisbane or Sydney, such as Hobart, Adelaide and Melbourne. Over the coming cruise season, Crown Princess will be the one large ship to buck the trend and sail out of a wider variety of Aussie ports, this seems to go a long way towards explaining the ship’s popularity. 

Of cruises leaving from Adelaide, Melbourne and Brisbane, Crown Princess has sold out every single one. This accounts for 10 cruises in total. All remaining cruises that are yet to sell out are out of either Sydney or Brisbane.

Furthermore, while there are no cruises out of Western Australia (although Princess will cruise out of Fremantle in 2028), every single itinerary that visits Western Australia is sold out as well.

Why is the Crown Princess selling out so fast? 

• Since Pacific Explorer left the larger Carnival fleet, Crown Princess will now be Australia’s main ship that homeports out of other cities. It has sold out cruises that leave from Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Singapore and Hobart over the coming months. 
• Aussie regional cruisers have been screaming out that there’s high demand for cruise itineraries out of towns like Adelaide, Hobart and Melbourne, and it appears the Crown Princess is proof of that.
• As noted, Crown Princess has far outperformed Discovery Princess, which is yet to sell out any cruises out of Australia. Discovery Princess will sail only out of Sydney.
• Crown Princess is also one of the only large ships that will sail to Western Australia over the coming season, and it has sold out all Western Australian itineraries. 
• Crown Princess’s season selling out at unprecedented rates appears to be clearly linked to its diversity in home ports and destinations, with every single cruise that is either from a port that is not Sydney or Melbourne, as well as all cruises that visit Western Australia, selling out. 

Is it time for other cruise lines to take note?

With regional Aussies coming out in numbers to prove there is high demand for cruises in their towns, this should hopefully make other cruise lines take notice. There are very few Aussie sailings on big ships that aren’t out of Sydney or Brisbane, despite massive demand for homeported cruises all around the country. 

Pacific Explorer left a massive gap in the market for this type of cruising, and surely a new ship will take its place soon, given the clear evidence that Aussies around the country are clamouring for more cruises at their doorstep.

With Royal Caribbean looking likely to centre their operations around Lelepa, cruise lines like Carnival or Celebrity would be more likely to fill the gaps and opt for a wider variety of homeporting cities and itineraries.

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