Spirit cruise ship spirits across our bow.

Goodbye old girl

The 1983-built Thomson Spirit cruise ship was a leased vessel owned by Holland America Line (Carnival Corporation's subsidiary company). The boat was launched as "ms Nieuw Amsterdam" and since 2003 was operated under a long-term charter (expired in 2017) by the UK company Marella Cruises (formerly "Thomson Cruises").

According to the shipowner Holland America Line, the ship left Marella's fleet on October 28, 2018, to join Celestyal Cruises renamed as "Celestyal Spirit". Sadly, on October 29, the vessel (renamed "Mare S") left port Piraeus-Athens to Alang India (shipbreaking yard) where was scrapped in November. The ship's identification numbers were 8024014 (IMO) and 248368000 (last MMSI, Malta-flagged).

Decks and Cabins
The boat had 10 decks, of which 9 were passenger-accessibel and 8 with cabins.
Thomson Spirit had a total of 627 staterooms (in 10 grades) including 21x Suites, 424x Oceanviews, 203x Inside, 21x Single cabins. Most staterooms were sized 145-175-ft2. Only 4 were wheelchair-accessible rooms. The largest accommodations were the Suites (430 ft2).
Standard inside and outside cabins were rather spacious (for an older-designed liner) and had good storage space. Lots of the outside staterooms had portholes rather than standard windows. Higher-grade outside cabins were larger-sized.