MSC Virtuosa
MSC Cruises · Cruise · In service · built by Chantiers de l'Atlantique
MSC Virtuosa shares her 181,541 GT hull with MSC Grandiosa, and became the first large cruise ship to sail from a UK port when the industry restarted in May 2021.
Derived metrics
Computed by ships.fyi from the core specification — see how we calculate these.
How big is it, really?
The MSC Virtuosa's length overall, against things you already know the size of.
The 747-8 held the longest-airliner record for over a decade, until Boeing's 777-9 took it by about 19 inches (76.72 m) — our sibling site aircraft.fyi measures everything that flies the same way.
One MSC Virtuosa = 1.23 Titanics · 3.2 football pitches · 13 blue whales · 4.3 Boeing 747-8s laid end to end.
Plan a sailing on MSC Virtuosa
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The numbers
| Length overall | 331.43 m |
|---|---|
| Beam (moulded) | 43 m |
| Gross tonnage | 181,541 GT |
| Passengers | 4,842 (double) / 6,334 (max) |
| Crew | ≈1,704 |
| Service speed | 22.3 kn |
| Launched | 29 November 2019 |
| Delivered | 1 February 2021 |
| Entered service | May 2021 |
Put the MSC Virtuosa next to something
Last verified: 2026-07-15 · Spot an error? business@luck.fyi
What makes it different
MSC Virtuosa is a ship whose story is mostly about timing. Floated out in November 2019 and due in service a year later, she instead sat finished and empty through the worst of the pandemic, and was finally handed over in February 2021 into an industry that had almost entirely stopped sailing.
What she then did was unusual: rather than wait, MSC sent her to Southampton for a season of UK-domestic round-trips, making her one of the first large cruise ships back in service anywhere and the ship that effectively reopened British cruising in May 2021.
Technically she is the second Meraviglia-Plus, sharing her 181,541-ton, 331-metre hull exactly with MSC Grandiosa. The signature spaces are the same — the Galleria promenade beneath a 98-metre LED dome, the Yacht Club forward, and a shopping galleria that MSC bills as the largest at sea — along with Rob, a humanoid robot bartender, which is either delightful or exactly what you feared, depending on temperament.
The MSC Virtuosa line
Meraviglia-Plus
Delayed debut
Who operates the MSC Virtuosa
All 1 operator of record, verified 2026-07-15. Figures marked ≈ are approximate.
MSCCMSC CruisesMediterranean and Northern Europe; ran the first UK domestic cruise season of the restart from Southampton.1✓→