The arrival of Disney Treasure in Port Canaveral represents a sea change for Disney Cruise Line

PORT CANAVERAL – The arrival of the Disney Treasure cruise ship in Florida is something Disney Cruise Line is used to as the second ship in a new class prepares for its maiden voyage.

What comes next marks new territory for the cruise line as it prepares to flood the market with seven more ships in seven years.

The shipping company is undergoing preview sailings on the Treasure ahead of its maiden voyage on December 21st. She then begins the normal seven-day Caribbean cruises and takes over the week-long duties, while her sister ship Disney Wish, which began sailing in 2022, continues the short three-day and four-night cruises from Port Canaveral.

“We’ve really been able to build on the launch of Disney Wish, and by leaving Treasure almost right behind – we certainly feel like we’re right behind – with new stories, new IP and new character experiences,” said Sharon Siskie , senior vice president and general manager of Disney Cruise Line said during an interview on the ship. “We’re just taking what we did with Wish and building on it and being able to add so many unique, different spaces and stories that make it really interesting and exciting for guests, our crew and our cast.”

The two ships are nearly identical in terms of spaces, but an adventure theme has driven the selection of venues and entertainment options aboard the new ship, including a Broadway-style play based on “Moana,” an “Aladdin-themed” atrium and adjacent rooms theme park attractions such as The Haunted Mansion, Jungle Cruise and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. There are also rooms dedicated to the films “The Aristocats” and “Coco” that can only be found at Treasure.

“It was hard to make decisions,” Siskie said. “So when you’re deciding which spaces… you just want to move through the fleet and then which ones you want to do something unique with, I think maybe the challenge for us was narrowing down and choosing, because we had so many good ideas .”

The arrival of the two ships within the last two years follows a pattern originally established with the debut of Disney Magic in 1998 and sister ship Disney Wonder in 1999. More than a decade passed before DCL expanded to four ships with Disney Dream in 2011 and Disney Fantasy in 2012.

However, DCL is now poised to expand its six-ship fleet to 13 ships within seven years from 2025 to 2031.

“We have increased capacity very slowly over time and I think we have found that we are very well positioned as a leader in the family cruise market,” Siskie said. “We have fans all over the world. We just have a great opportunity to do more and we know that, so we’re very optimistic and we felt like now is the time to do it.”

This also includes a third Wish-class ship, the Disney Destiny, debuting for the first time at a location other than Port Canaveral and arriving at its new second Florida homeport, Port Everglades, in November 2025, which will be the largest DCL ship when Disney Adventure starts in Singapore?

A fourth Wish-class ship is being built to leave Japan by 2029, and Disney has announced four more ships in a yet-to-be-named new class coming between 2027 and 2031.

Additionally, the presence in Florida will be much larger, with five ships scheduled to sail from either Port Canaveral or Port Everglades during the 2025-2026 winter sailing season. This coincides with the debut of a second private Bahamas destination this year, Lookout Cay at Lighthouse Point on the southern tip of Eleuthera, joining Disney’s original popular island destination Castaway Cay.

“Florida is really, really important to us,” Siskie said. “Our home at Walt Disney World certainly contributes and plays a role. We have many, many guests from all over the world visiting Walt Disney World. This gives us a really good opportunity for guests who would sail one of our ships from Florida.”

As a result, she said, the line is producing many cruise newbies who incorporate the cruise experience into their theme park plans.

“They choose Disney first and they choose to cruise because of Disney, and for them you know some of the shorter cruises, the Bahamas or the Caribbean are just very attractive to a new cruiser,” she said. “We know we have a lot of additional need.”

The pace at which new cruise ships are coming online may be faster than in the past, but Siskie said she believes the line is prepared.

“Of course there is still a lot of work ahead of us, but we have a lot of experience in this business,” she said. “We know how to create a great cruise product. We know what our guests want. We really want to build on all of the things that have made Disney Cruise Line a cruising experience for the whole family, and we know what our guests love.”

But decisions about exactly what will be aboard some of the new ships will need to be made more quickly than with previous new ships.

“Because of the timing and the nature of the cadence of all this, there will be some sort of compression where in the past you would do things in order,” she said. “And now we’re doing some things… a little more batched than sequential.”

And while sailing on more ships means hiring more crew to support the experience, Siskie said most of the new hires aren’t being looted from other cruise lines.

“We are very fortunate that we attract the best in the world, and when you think about expanding the fleet, you also think about how we continue to increase the number of crew members we have,” she said. “Generally we target a specific type of person and create a profile of how they think about service.

“And so often we hire and train. … In fact, we find it’s easier to teach the Disney way if they just come to us with their experiences and we teach them everything they need to know.”

In the meantime, the focus is on Disney Treasure, whose preparation for its debut with paying customers has been going smoothly so far.

“We are currently in the phase of building new ships. The desire was the first, and I think that’s probably where we learned the most,” she said. “Now I feel like this was a beautiful start and everything has been going so well for Treasure.

“Everyone is just excited and ready to go.”