Viking Line has announced it has signed a letter of intent with the Xiamen Shipbuilding Industry Co. to build a passenger vessel for delivery in the spring of 2020. The new vessel will serve the Turku (Finland)-Åland Islands (Finland)-Stockholm (Sweden) route.
The aim is to sign a final agreement during the spring of 2017, said Viking.
The total investment is about 190 million euros. The letter of intent also includes an option for an additional vessel.
The vessel is intended to be a collaborative project, and the plan is to engage a number of Finnish and other European supplier.
The 63,000-ton vessel will be 218 metres in length with capacity for 2,800 guests, and the length of its cargo lanes will be 1,500 meters.
Viking Line will hire Scandinavian architects for the interior design.
“Our intention is for the vessel to run on liquefied natural gas (LNG). We have excellent experience with this from the M/S Viking Grace, the first large LNG-powered passenger vessel in the world. Great emphasis has been placed in the planning work on environmentally sound solutions, including new innovative energy-efficient applications. Many years of planning work have gone into this newbuilding project in conjunction with the European Union’s Motorways of the Seas project under the scope of the Connecting Europe Facility funding instrument, which has also included the Port of Turku and the Ports of Stockholm,” said Jan Hanses, Viking Line’s CEO.
