Update, 31 July 2026: The shelf has thinned again — Oceania has sold the 684-guest Sirena to a buyer it isn’t naming. Buying a cruise ship should be easy when you’re not fussy about mileage.
That’s Ambassador’s whole trick. The Essex-based line has never built a ship and never will — its boss Christian Verhounig has said “I can guarantee we will never build a new ship.” Instead it takes on the ships the big lines are finished with, refits them, and squeezes another decade out of them. The alternative, as Ambassador sees it, is the scrapyard.
And it’s produced quite the back catalogue. Ambience spent thirty years working for Princess and P&O Australia — with a brief spell as an abandoned crypto ship, of all things — before Ambassador took her in. Ambition came from AIDA. Renaissance arrived with last year’s merger with France’s CFC.
In May, the line promised ship number four would be announced this year. Lovely. Except when you look at what’s actually for sale, you start to wonder what they know that we don’t.
The ones that got away
The obvious candidates have already gone.
Costa Fortuna looked tantalising — leaving Costa this September, buyer mysteriously unnamed. Then the mystery buyer turned out to be Margaritaville at Sea, who’ll relaunch her as the Beachcomber. Cheeseburgers in paradise, not cream teas in Tilbury.
Norwegian Sky and Norwegian Sun? Off to India’s Cordelia Cruises — the first ships to leave the Norwegian fleet in 17 years. And not even sold: chartered. The big lines are hanging on to their old ships, not flogging them.
The ghost fleet
Then there’s the warehouse option.
Greek ferry magnate Marios Iliopoulos spent the pandemic buying up laid-up cruise ships at knockdown prices, and his Seajets operation has been sitting on them ever since. Waiting for buyers.
And in that ghost fleet is a ship that should make Ambassador’s shopping list write itself: Queen of the Oceans — better known to British cruisers as P&O’s Oceana. Seventeen years sailing from Southampton. 77,000 tons, built in 2000, room for about 2,000 passengers. She’s been laid up in Greece since 2020, waiting for exactly this phone call.
Ambassador knows the number, too. Its own Renaissance came through the Seajets stable — Holland America sold her to Iliopoulos, who passed her on to CFC, whose merger with Ambassador brought her aboard. The ghost fleet has fed this line before.
Iliopoulos is also sitting on the former Veendam and the former Majesty of the Seas — though neither is ageing gracefully. Recent drone footage of Majesty shows a ship going quietly green at anchor, and the ex-Veendam has reportedly struggled to find a buyer partly because a 2009 rebuild left her an awkward ship to run.
And the ghost fleet is thinning. Costa Magica — sister to the Fortuna that Margaritaville just carried off — was in the Iliopoulos collection too, until she was sold this year and sent to China for conversion. Even the warehouse is selling down.
The catch with what’s left? Six years is a long sleep. These ships have been sitting cold, not ticking over, and every year at anchor adds to the refit bill before they earn a penny — which is rather why they’re still there. Available and ready are very different things.
Right size, wrong owner
Plenty of ships fit the Ambassador template perfectly. Shame nobody’s selling them.
P&O’s Aurora might be the most Ambassador-shaped ship afloat — 76,000 tons, built 2000, already adults-only. But P&O has nothing on order, so there’s no replacement coming. They can’t spare her.
Marella’s Discovery and Discovery 2 are the right sort of tonnage too, but they’re already secondhand ships living their second life. Unless TUI shuffles an old Mein Schiff down the chain — and nothing of the sort is announced — they’re going nowhere.
Holland America’s Volendam and Zaandam have the perfect bloodline — Ambassador’s Renaissance is ex-Holland America, and so are Fred. Olsen’s Bolette and Borealis. Both are refurbished, working, and booked through 2027.
And Norwegian Spirit? We nearly wrote her off — NCL’s oldest, but with over $100m lavished on her bow to stern. Then again, that refit was 2020. Norwegian’s had six years out of it, the line has just started clearing its older metal — Sky and Sun are off to India — and there’s an enormous order book of new ships to pay for somehow. The oldest ship left in a fleet that’s suddenly willing to let ships leave? More possible than we first thought.
The sale that hasn’t started
Royal Caribbean’s oldest ships turn 30 over the next couple of years, and Royal has ordered a new class of smaller ships — the Discovery class — partly to replace exactly this sort of tonnage.
Promising. Until you clock the delivery date: the first Discovery ship doesn’t arrive until late 2029. The great sell-off everyone expects hasn’t started, because the replacements don’t exist yet.
Same at Princess, where the 1998-built Grand Princess is forever tipped to go as the new giants arrive. Nothing announced. And at over 100,000 tons she’d be a proper leap for a line whose biggest ship is 70,000.
The bottom line
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about the secondhand ship market: there’s a queue. Fred. Olsen, Celestyal, Margaritaville, Cordelia and Germany’s Phoenix Reisen all shop the same shelf. Fred. Olsen’s boss Samantha Stimpson went looking for a 2026 ship herself and came back empty-handed, noting that “cruise companies are holding on to their vessels for a bit longer.”
So Ambassador has promised a ship in a year when everything in service is staying put, and everything for sale has been asleep in a Greek bay since 2020.
Our money, for what it’s worth, is on the ghost fleet — Queen of the Oceans is the right size, knows the British no-fly trade better than most, and is actually for sale. But this is the line that made its flagship out of an abandoned crypto ship. Finding the vessel nobody saw coming is rather their thing.
I think more likely that Ambassador will purchase once of the MSC Lyrica Class Ships and then a second next year as both are up for grabs and on ship broker sites and half sisters to Ambition (Mistral)