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

Josh Weinstein: Yes. So Costa is one of those brands that’s really on the rebound, and we’re really proud of Mario Zanetti, the President, and his whole team have been accomplishing and will continue to. Their research based on their market and the segment that they’re trying to hit in their market was all about experiences and leaning into particular messaging in particular ways to convey it because the product for Costa is already fantastic. So it’s always a matter of how do we then convey that messaging the right way to the right people so they’re going to understand want to pay to get onboard and then spend that money onboard. So there’s actually a lot of work that the Costa team and some external help put in to make sure that we’re marrying those things up together. And this will be the output. So I’m very excited about that trajectory.

Jaime Katz: Okay. And I think earlier, you had mentioned that there were a number of new consumers coming into the brand. And I’d be curious if you guys can break out maybe the demographics? Are there significantly more younger consumers? Does that provide a better lifetime value for the business? How should we think about that? Thanks.

Josh Weinstein: So I don’t have that data certainly at the ready. If we can kind of give you some more color, we’ll Beth try to do that for you and she can circle back up with you. But this – from my perspective, the efforts about, in part, the advertising, in part just being up and sailing again. So you get your repeaters getting off the ship and telling their friends and family how amazing it is simply attracts newcomers. And so what’s quite encouraging is the fact that our loyalists have been consistent over the last four quarters, and all of that growth that we’ve been seeing has been coming from first to cruise or first to brand means that those activities are really starting to pay off. And we think that there’s – if you think about the cruise industry in the context of the vacation industry, we’re casting in that in a really big ocean. So that bodes very well for us.

Operator: Our next question comes from Assia Georgieva with Infinity Research. Please proceed.

Assia Georgieva: Good morning guys. Congratulations on a great quarter and a really nice outlook both for Q4 and the upcoming year. I had a couple of questions, Josh. Ticket has become a more reliable gauge now that we have gone into full recovery mode, the entire fleet is sailing. Onboard, while strong, should be less of a consideration? Or should we also think of the elongated booking curve offering these 40% of pre-cruise bookings and wallets being replenished, again, is something that would provide even greater stability?

Josh Weinstein: Sure. I think – so first of all, thank you for the comments. The – certainly, the onboard component of our increases over the past several quarters has been outpaced by the improvement that we’re seeing in the ticket. And so I think to your point, whereas the onboard component was a larger piece of our outperformance overall on net per diems, really, what we’ve been able to see is the ticket price is really coming on, which is encouraging. The fact though that, again, in ultimate terms, the onboard spending has remained constant in absolute levels gives us a lot of confidence that we’re doing the right things, and we’re providing the right options for our guests to spend on experiences. And so I think it’s actually a very good mix.

And the ability for us to pull forward more onboard spending, as you mentioned, the 40% of our onboard spend pulled forward. While that’s a huge increase of 11 points, it was below 30 points back in 2019. That means there’s still an awful lot of room to continue to do that. And so I think those components set us up very nicely.

Assia Georgieva: Great. And maybe the two very quick questions, probably more for David. Should we expect about $4 billion to $5 billion a year of debt repayments to get to investment grade by year-end 2026?