In this work, a shear deformable viscoelastic sandwich shell element is proposed for doubly curved sandwich shell panels with passive constrained layer damping (PCLD) treatment. The transverse displacements of the constraining layer and base layer are considered to be independent besides the in-plane displacements. The transverse and in-plane displacements of the viscoelastic core are considered to be varying linearly through the thickness. Shear as well as normal deformations of the core are included in the analysis. The equation of motion the doubly curved sandwich shell panel under free vibration is derived via Hamilton's principle. The modal frequencies and modal loss factors of the Isotropic elastic-Viscoelastic-Isotropic elastic (IVI) sandwich shell panel and Laminated elastic-Viscoelastic-Laminated elastic (LVL) sandwich panel are obtained from numerical solutions using finite element method in conjunction with Hamilton's principle. Parametric studies are carried out to ascertain the effects of shell geometries, aspect ratio, orthotropicity of the skins, core layer thickness, constraining layer thickness, core loss factor on the natural frequencies and system loss factors under different boundary conditions. © 2018 Elsevier Masson SAS