I’m relaunching this blog page tomorrow – and part of the redesign will be Tuesday Cruiseday posts .. but I thought I’d post this here, first.

With all the bad PR that P&O is getting over the Aria and the Eden (and questions about whether they were rushed through their refurbishments), you may have missed some pretty significant news: P&O Australia is to get its first 4,000+ passenger ship within 4 years.

That’s on top of the already-announced Pacific Explorer, which will have more than 22-hundred berths.

According to the company, the new ship will be the seventh in the cruise line’s fleet (recently expanded with the addition of Pacific Aria and Pacific Eden in November) to meet growing demand for cruises in Australia.

Australia is one of the top performing cruise markets in the world, with an average annual passenger growth rate of 20 percent over the past decade.

Carnival (the parent company of P&O) says the new 4,200-passenger ship will have the largest passenger capacity from the line.

As an indication of how big a step this is, consider this: the current fleet of five ships (Pacific Dawn, Pearl, Jewel, Aria and Eden) can carry a total of around 8400 passengers.

The as-yet unnamed ship announced this week will carry half that total on a single vessel.

The ship will be built by one of the world’s largest cruise ship building companies, Fincantieri, at the company’s Italian shipyards with delivery expected by 2020.