Tonnage, honestly
Carnival ship classes, side by side
Tonnage is the honest way to compare cruise ships, and it is wildly unintuitive: the largest class in the fleet is more than three times the volume of the smallest, but only about a third longer.
One canvas, one scale
Every class at true relative scale
Largest to smallest, each class labelled with gross tonnage and guest capacity from our fleet data.
Original artwork produced for this site. No Carnival branding, no livery, and not a photograph of any ship. The drawn lengths are proportions used for the illustration — they are not a verified specification and should not be quoted as one.
The numbers
Class by class
Tonnage and guest figures are the largest ship in each class, which is how the silhouettes are drawn too.
Loading class comparison
Within a class, individual ships differ by a few thousand tons after refits — the per-ship figures are on each ship’s own page.
The honest version
Bigger is not automatically better.
An Excel-class ship has a roller coaster and eleven places to eat; it also has five thousand people trying to get off it in Cozumel. A Spirit-class ship fits through the old Panama Canal locks and into ports the big hulls cannot reach. Which one suits you depends on the trip, not the tonnage — tell us what you want out of the week and we will tell you which ships to look at.