Carnival Cruise Line will budget $200 million for an
overhaul of the Carnival Triumph so sweeping that the ship will get a new name,
the Carnival Sunrise.
It is only the second time that Carnival has renamed a ship
of its own design. In 2013, it rechristened the former Carnival Destiny as the
Carnival Sunshine.
Carnival said the two ships will form the new Sunshine
class. The $200 million sum is the largest ever spent by a cruise line in a
ship renovation.
By the time the work begins next March, the Triumph will be
20 years old. It is perhaps best known for an engine-room fire in 2013 that
left it disabled off the coast of Mexico without power for most hotel services.
The ship had to be towed back to the United States, on a four-day odyssey that
was memorialized as "the poop cruise" because toilets didn't work for
most of the trip.
In the two-month renovation, to be done at the Navantia
shipyard in Cadiz, Spain, a laundry list of Fun Ship 2.0 features will be added
to the ship, including seven restaurants, two bars, two lounges, three new pool
deck attractions, a newly designed spa, two new children's play areas and new
retail spaces, including a candy store.
Gus Antocha, Carnival's chief operating officer, said the
additions complement certain upgrades that had already been made to the
Triumph, such as Guy's Burger Joint.
Unique to the Sunrise will be what Antocha called "bridge
wing suites," encompassing two junior suites and two larger Captain's
Suites adjacent to the bridge, which will be redesigned with floor-to-ceiling
windows. In total, Carnival will add 115 new cabins to the ship,
which has a current capacity of 2,758 guests at double occupancy.
"We're adding a handful of different spaces,"
Antocha said. When the Carnival Sunshine was created, an extra 182 cabins were
added to the Carnival Destiny.
The first sailing of the Carnival Sunrise, following a
renaming ceremony, will be from Norfolk, Va., where the ship will begin a
series of five- to seven-day cruises on April 29, 2019. It will then move to New York
for the summer for a series of four- to 14-day cruises, starting May 23. It will
move to Fort Lauderdale for four- and five-day cruises in October.