San Diego’s Biggest Cruise Season in Sixteen Years Starts Now

Ruby Princess opened San Diego’s 2026-27 cruise season on September 15, and the numbers behind the sailing are the real story. The Port of San Diego expects 183 sailings this season, up from 109 the year before, and more than 700,000 cruise passengers moving through its terminals. That makes it the port’s strongest season in over a decade, in a market that spent years being written off as a secondary West Coast call — somewhere ships stopped on the way to somewhere else rather than a place voyages actually began.

The headline arrival comes in October, when Royal Caribbean’s Serenade of the Seas begins homeporting in San Diego for the first time since 2010. The ship will operate three, four and seven-night voyages to Cabo San Lucas, Ensenada and La Paz, the last of which is a new port of call for the line. Royal Caribbean had largely ceded the California market for the better part of a decade, concentrating its North American capacity in Florida, Texas and the Caribbean, and its return is the clearest signal yet that the West Coast has stopped being an afterthought in deployment planning.

For travellers, a bigger San Diego season means more short Mexican Riviera itineraries that do not require first flying to Florida or Texas, and considerably more competition on those sailings than the market has seen in years. Short cruises out of Southern California are among the most price-sensitive products in the industry, marketed heavily to drive-in customers from Los Angeles, Orange County and Arizona. Adding 74 sailings in a single season, in a market that size, tends to show up in fares fairly quickly, particularly on the three and four-night departures.

The port has been investing to handle the growth, and the shape of the season — a mix of turnarounds and port calls spread across autumn, winter and spring rather than clustered in a few months — suggests operators now treat San Diego as a year-round base rather than a seasonal convenience between Alaska and the Panama Canal. Whether 183 sailings becomes a floor or turns out to be a peak depends largely on how the Mexican Riviera itineraries sell this winter, and on whether the pricing holds once the extra capacity is actually in the water.

Sources: Royal Caribbean Blog, TravelAge West