MONFALCONE, ITALY — MSC Cruises officially took delivery of its new flagship MSC Seaside at a recent ceremony in Italy. The Seaside is the cruise line’s second newly-built ship to come into service in 2017, and is being hailed as a completely new prototype of innovative ship building and design.

With a guest capacity of 5,119, MSC Seaside will homeport in Miami and begin sailing in the Caribbean where it will call at various ports in the East and West Caribbean. Its sister ship MSC Seaview will come into service in June 2018, starting its summer season in the Mediterranean.

During the delivery ceremony, MSC Cruises and ship-building company Fincantieri also signed orders for the construction of two Seaside EVO ships, for a total investment of €1.8 billion. The initial slot reservation agreement to build a third Seaside Class ship to be delivered in 2021 has been replaced to instead build the first of two Seaside EVO ships. The second ship is set to come into service in 2023.

“As we are nearing the end of 2017, we can look back on a year when we enjoyed unprecedented capacity growth. With two of the more innovative new ships in the industry having come into service in the past six months and now with the addition of two Seaside EVO ships to our investment plan, we are now even better positioned to further extend our global footprint. We are expecting the delivery of at least one new ship each year through 2026, with six to have come into service between 2017 and 2020,” said Pierfrancesco Vago, executive chairman of MSC Cruises.

With the addition of these new ships, the Company’s already industry-unprecedented investment plan will now account for 12 new ships to be built between 2017 and 2026, for an overall investment of EUR 10.5 billion.