Passengers per square foot

My wife and I have been invited by a group of friends to join them for a cruise on the Viking Star in 2018. We took our first cruise on the QM2 in May of this year. One of the many things that really surprised us was how uncrowded the ship felt. I know that the QM2 carries almost 2700 passengers and that the Viking Star carries just shy of 1000 but can anyone tell me what the square footage of common public space (interior and exterior) there is on either ship. Being able to compare the square footage per passenger of common public space would help us make the decision weather to go or not. We've done a lot of googling on this but so far cannot find this information for either ship.

Thanks,

Harold

That is one of the things we like about the Viking ships, they aren't crowded and they don't feel crowded. But, honestly, it you need some obscure statistic to quantify your choice, you may be out of luck. Somethings cannot be reduce to a simple ratio. Not all public space is equal.

My wife and I have been invited by a group of friends to join them for a cruise on the Viking Star in 2018. We took our first cruise on the QM2 in May of this year. One of the many things that really surprised us was how uncrowded the ship felt. I know that the QM2 carries almost 2700 passengers and that the Viking Star carries just shy of 1000 but can anyone tell me what the square footage of common public space (interior and exterior) there is on either ship. Being able to compare the square footage per passenger of common public space would help us make the decision weather to go or not. We've done a lot of googling on this but so far cannot find this information for either ship.

 

 

 

Thanks,

 

Harold

I'm sorry but reading your post just cracked me up. And I'm still laughing. When we were on the Star last year, I never felt like the ship was crowded in the least. Ok. So maybe once but that was when everybody and I mean just about everybody was gathered in, around, and above the Atrium for the big Captain's Farewell Reception. But other than that, the design of the ship is such that you never ever felt crowded. I just fail to understand why a metric like square footage per passenger matters.

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Harold, I don't have a clue about the technical questions you want answered. However I can tell you that we've been on Viking Oceans twice already with another three booked. If I felt the least bit squished, they wouldn't have my business. ;)

Check out this site:

http://www.cruisemapper.com/wiki/761-cruise-ship-passenger-capacity-ratings

Viking ships aren't posted, but I did see that their space ratio is 51.5. That's quite spacious!

Check out Berlitz Cruising & Cruise Ships 2018 [probably available at your local library]. It lists the specs [and full reviews] of every ocean cruise ship.

FYI: QM2 has a space ratio of 56.0; the Viking Ocean ships are 51.5 -- but QM2 is a class-based ship so not all passengers get to experience all those spaces, while Viking is 'all access.' [by comparison, most mass-market ships are in the 40s]

I can't give you a technical answer, but I have sailed on both QM2 and Viking Sky in the last two years, and in my opinion Viking feels far more spacious at all times. We sailed for 2 weeks on the Viking Homelands cruise and constantly said to each other "Where IS everybody?"

Viking is now our first choice, for both river and ocean cruising. An outstanding experience. Looking forward to next June, and the Midnight Sun on Viking Sea.

I can't give you a technical answer, but I have sailed on both QM2 and Viking Sky in the last two years, and in my opinion Viking feels far more spacious at all times. We sailed for 2 weeks on the Viking Homelands cruise and constantly said to each other "Where IS everybody?"

Viking is now our first choice, for both river and ocean cruising. An outstanding experience. Looking forward to next June, and the Midnight Sun on Viking Sea.

Such a perfect answer!

Just a few technical corrections.

Gross tonnage, as used by many sources for the "passenger space ratio" has not been equal to 100 cu. ft. since the 1980's when GRT (Gross Registered Tonnage) was retired as a measurement of ships. The newer "Gross Tonnage" is a unitless figure derived from the ship's total enclosed volume, but using design coefficients that make GT non-linear to the actual enclosed volume.

The other major problem with "passenger space ratios" is that it uses GT (Gross Tonnage, or the total enclosed space of the ship), when a large percentage of that volume is not passenger space at all (fuel and water tanks, machinery spaces, crew quarters). A truer measure of passenger space ratio would use "Net Tonnage" (the volume of the ship allocated to cargo (in this case the passengers)) which removes all of the non-passenger volume from the ratio. The problem is that Net Tonnage is not a widely published figure, unlike GT, so the data is not available

Thanks all.

Jammy Bun, at the end of the day I think your first hand experience on both ships is more telling than all of the calculations. It is the actual experience of spaciousness that we are looking for. Thanks for your insight.

Harold

Thanks all.

Jammy Bun, at the end of the day I think your first hand experience on both ships is more telling than all of the calculations. It is the actual experience of spaciousness that we are looking for. Thanks for your insight.

 

Harold

In our family, we call that the "feel good factor" and it trumps statistics every time!