Hop aboard a new-generation of sleek, small cruise ships

There was a time, not so long ago, when cruising felt naff, a mass-market proposition for people who wanted water slides, endless buffets, pink drinks and themed nights for 2,000 passengers. Something shifted ten years ago, around the time the Seabourn Encore sailed over the horizon with its ground-breaking, expansive all-ocean-fronting suites for barely 800 passengers, Thomas Keller restaurant, and luxe, sun-lit interiors by Adam Tihany.

If there were ever an inflection point in the luxury cruise industry, this was it. In the intervening years, this market sector has grown Hulk-like, with global revenue projected to hit $23.14 billion by 2035, with ultra-premium bookings up 43% year-on-year.

The industry has money and momentum, clearly, but what’s especially clear is that high-net-worth travellers are taking fewer trips, whilst spending significantly more on privacy, cultural immersion, and exclusivity. When everyone from Ponant to Silversea offers all-inclusive packages, traditional markers of quality no longer differentiate. The existential question facing the industry seems to revolve around what actually defines ‘cool’ in luxury cruising today?

Sea change

The answer, increasingly, is smallness. Four Seasons I launched in March with just 95 suites created by Tillberg Design and Martin Brudnizki, and a 1:1 guest-staff ratio. The Orient Express Corinthian debuts this month as the world’s largest sailing yacht at 722 feet, carrying only 54 suites, with Michelin-starred chef Yannick Alléno overseeing five restaurants and French interior designer Maxime d’Angeac creating the illusion of a moneyed hipster’s Parisian apartment that happens to float. Emerald Kaia, which launched in April, is nimble enough to navigate the bijou Corinth Canal, whilst Aqua Lares, which launched in February, carries just 30 guests on polar and tropical expeditions.

The spectacle of the ship itself no longer matters. What matters is yacht-ification – the deliberate rejection of traditional cruise-ship scale in favour of intimate, design-focused vessels.

This shift extends beyond passenger count to privileged access. The Ritz-Carlton’s Luminara offers helicopter excursions over Bangkok’s skyline and vintage Hermes Birkins in the gift shop. Explora II has an art gallery selling pieces by Hockney, Hirst, Picasso, and Warhol, alongside watch boutiques by Panerai, Piaget and Cartier TK– the fleet’s signature move having been the installation of the world’s only floating Rolex boutique on Explora I.

On every metric, these ships are essentially floating design showcases, providing double branding for both ship and designer, transforming retail and art into destination experiences in their own right.

Compare this to Regent Seven Seas’ Prestige, debuting in December with the largest all-inclusive suite at sea: a gigantic 8,794 square feet across two levels, starting at $25,000 per night. It boasts a personal gym, sauna, 3,703 square feet of wraparound balcony, and exclusive access to a private 12-person dining venue. But it’s still the old ‘bigger is better’ thinking, the belief that luxury scales linearly with square footage. The new guard doesn’t think this way. They want vessels that go where bigger ships can’t reach – remote archipelagos, Arctic ice shelves, shallow Adriatic harbours or, in the case of Windstar’s Star Explorer, which also launches this December, up the Thames into central London and along the Seine to Paris.

And they want onboard experiences that blur the boundary between land and sea. This blurring happens through design. Patricia Urquiola’s work on Celebrity Edge’s Eden and her upcoming Owner’s Residence for Explora III’s summer launch proves that big-name designers elevate everything into competitive necessity – the maritime equivalent of ‘The Hunger Games’. Tom Dixon designed Virgin Voyages’ suites. Kelly Hoppen handled Celebrity Edge, too, and Emerald Kaia tapped Missoni for its interiors, bringing Italian fashion house pedigree to a 128-guest yacht.

Aware of the stakes, SINOT is anchoring Aman’s spring 2027 launch, Amangati, with a Japanese-inspired serenity garden within a 12,817-square-foot spa – the largest ever installed on a yacht – complete with treatment rooms overlooking the sea and an aesthetic vocabulary drawn directly from ryokan tradition.

This is the hardware. The software amps up the cultural and leisure programming. Explora partners with curators for onboard art enrichment seminars. The Seabourn expedition voyages feature a team of almost 20 marine biologists, ornithologists, historians, photographers, and scientists to lead guest excursions. Aman promises cultural immersion tied to port destinations, with concierge-planned bespoke excursions and late departures allowing guests to attend events like the Cannes Film Festival or Monaco Grand Prix from the ship. Both Four Seasons I and Ritz-Carlton Luminara feature a transverse marina – a floating platform that opens directly to the sea for kayaking, paddle-boarding, and deluxe water toys like electric hydrofoils, treating the ocean as an extension of the vessel’s living space.

This represents a values shift as much as an aesthetic one. Hospitality brands are colonising the seas, yes – but they and their top-end maritime rivals are duking it out on the specs.

The ‘cool’ cruise is the anti-cruise: intimate, yacht-like, and design-driven with whisper-quiet hallways, suites facing uninterrupted horizons, art galleries with minimum five-figure price tags, and boutiques where the inventory is genuine scarcity. It’s about going to fewer places with more depth, staying longer in port, having fewer guests with better access, and surrounding them with interiors that feel residential – the entire ecosystem of high-end retail and experience architecture transplanted onto hulls kept small enough to feel exclusive and hold FOMO temporarily at bay.

It’s a fundamentally different value proposition from traditional cruise models, one in which the vessel itself becomes a curated design object – a seagoing gallery, a mobile boutique hotel.

Where premium travel has matured beyond spectacle into something more considered, the ship has become the destination itself – not despite its smallness, but because of it. The ports provide variety, yes, but the vessel is the constant luxury: refined, known, controlled. And the ultimate privilege? The freedom to move without disruption, to leave when the crowds arrive – an entire world, intimate and extravagantly adrift.

A version of this article appears in the June 2026 Travel Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.