Carnival Corporation & plc (NYSE:CCL) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Josh Weinstein: Sure. So if this will be ongoing, I would expect, give or take in another month, we’ll start coming out with even more. I’m happy to tell you, though, when it comes to how we’ll be able to monetize the private island in addition to the premium that we’ll be getting on the ticket side for such an amazing experience. The standards for any type of private destination, F&B, Cabana rentals, other experiences. And so more will come, but that’s all in the plan.

Robin Farley: Okay. All right. Great. Thank you.

Operator: Our next question comes from David Katz with Jefferies. Please proceed.

Josh Weinstein: Hello, David, you there?

David Katz: Oh, apologies. Left on mute. Thanks for taking my question. Josh, what I wanted to just talk about for a minute is not so much this quarter, next quarter, but I’d love an update and – some updated perspectives around things that you are focused on to just improve the operating execution in a broader sense. Are there potentially low-hanging fruit or things that you can change, some of which you talked about at the analyst meeting a while back? Thank you.

Josh Weinstein: Yes. I’ll give you an overall, which is I don’t think that there’s anything revolutionary here. It is simply continuing to do our jobs better brand by brand. And we’ve highlighted, for example, Carnival Cruise Line and just the amazing results that they’ve had quarter-over-quarter. Other brands are catching up. And they’re doing that because they are focused on their revenue management techniques. They’re focused on delivering the experience onboard. They’re focused on their performance marketing and generating more leads to generate more bookings, positioning themselves appropriately in the market. So all of those things are incrementally helping piece by piece. And that’s the kind of effort that we need from our brands and their teams to be focused on all aspects of that commercial business.

And so we’ll continue to focus on that so that they continue to focus on it as well. And so on the revenue side, I feel like we’re making good momentum. On the cost side, there will always be opportunity for us to do better. David mentioned that we’ll only maybe get a little bit of scale benefit from the newbuilds, and that’s certainly true that are coming in. But there’s always opportunity to look for efficiency and leverage scale on the existing fleet, right, in how we do our purchasing, how we benchmark against each other to find ways to do things more efficiently on the ships, source more efficiently. Scale will increase because frankly speaking, we’re going to be carrying a lot more guests next year than we did this year and than we did in 2019, and that gives us more opportunity to leverage scale.

So I’m pretty encouraged that up and down the P&L, there will be opportunities.

David Katz: Got it. And if I can just follow-up on one specific area. You talked about performance marketing, I believe, at the analyst meeting a bit also. And where is that and what opportunities still lie ahead to drive revenue and profit there?

Josh Weinstein: I think we’re – I think it’s fair to say that as technology advances and our teams are better able to utilize that, there’s more and more opportunity to be very surgical about the guests that we’re looking for and how to get them and their eyes looking at us and looking at our websites, pointing them to travel agents, whatever that might be. So I’d say that, that’s pretty early days. And even though we’ve made some pretty marked improvement when it comes to some of the stats that we’ve shown you as some indicators, and we really don’t talk about things like conversion rate or things like that. We’re very encouraged by the progress, and there’s certainly a lot more room to run.

David Katz: Noted. Thanks very much.

Josh Weinstein: Thank you.

Operator: Our next question comes from Dan Politzer with Wells Fargo. Please proceed.