Matthew Boss: Great color. Congrats again.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Conor Cunningham with Melius Research. Please go ahead.
Conor Cunningham: Hi, everyone. Thank you. Just keeping with the theme on cruise versus land in the context of moderate yield growth, there seems to be an argument that you can make that actually should be a little bit higher given you’re going to close the gap to land based. Can you just level set on where you sit on the discount versus land based right now? And then how we get back to kind of the pre-COVID levels, I think that’s been like 15% historically. So if you could just talk about that, that’d be great. Thank you.
Jason Liberty: Yes. So obviously, last year we talked around having a 40% to 45% gap to land based vacation. Our yields in 2023 rose 13.5%. Our APDS were up, I think 16%. So we obviously made a dent into that. And this year we expect obviously, to make a further dent into that. We are obsessed about really, it’s much less about what’s happening in the cruise space. It’s more about how do we close that gap, how do we compete with land based vacation and we can see in the consideration how much cruise has moved into the average consumer’s consideration for travel. So our focus is on that. How do we close that gap? And really how do we make sure going back to the ecosystem, which I think land based does very well, is how do we make sure that, that focus on a vacation of a lifetime evolves into a lifetime of vacation.
And I think the commentary about the return of what we’re getting from our customers, that repeat rate has now doubled, shows that what we’re doing in delivering the best vacations in the world, what we’re doing to incentivize through loyalty, to keep our customers in our ecosystem, and really leveraging our house of brands that are the best in each one of their segments is really starting to create another Wave of demand. And we think land based does this really well. We’re focused on doing this obviously exceptionally well. And when you think about what we’re doing on the destination side with perfect day as an example, when you look at Icon, you can see in that how it’s an extremely competitive product, we would probably argue even a better product to what’s happening on land.
And that’s by us continuing to dream and innovate and deliver on that, that’s going to chip away further and further into that value gap to land based vacation.
Conor Cunningham: Super helpful. And then you mentioned the digital investments and increased direct bookings. Can you just talk about how that’s evolved over the past few years and how we continue to kind of increase the direct booking channel going forward? Thank you.
Jason Liberty: Yes, well, it’s less about the shift from direct or through our travel partners. We are really channel agnostic. What we want to do is whether it’s we want to show up on how our guests want to shop and book a cruise and we want to take as much friction out of that experience as we possibly can. Sometimes that leads them through our digital channels like the web or our app. Sometimes it has them call our call centers. And of course, that very much takes them to our travel partners who do an exceptional job helping guests identify and have the experiences that they want to do. So we’re very agnostic about that. But we also recognize that the customer expects very little friction in their shopping experience. So we spent a lot of time figuring out not only how to be easier to do business with, but also how to use technology like AI and so forth, to curate and put those experiences in front of the guests in the way in which they want to consume them.
I think we’re getting better and better at that every day, but it’s a journey. When I feel we’re heading to the fourth or fifth inning, I find out we’re back in the first inning as the consumer continues to evolve and just the technology that’s available to do it, so thoughtfully is growing stronger and stronger every day.
Naftali Holtz: Yes. And just one other thing to add is also it allows us to make sure that the customer gets the vacations they want. So some of the meaningful progress we’ve seen, and we also noted in the last couple of earnings call, is just the ability to buy and design your vacation ahead of time through pre-cruise. And as Jason mentioned also in the remarks, it also leads to great financial success as people are booking their vacations, then they get on board and they spend two and a half times more than those that have in pre cruise.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Vince Ciepiel with Cleveland Research. Please go ahead.
Vince Ciepiel: Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to dig a little bit more into the Icon. You keep talking about how it’s taking things to a new level. Curious kind of how it compares to what you saw with a new class. You think about Oasis 15 years ago, Quantum 10 years ago. How does this launch compare in terms of reception to the customer, the travel agent community, the national coverage that you’ve been getting, your approach to marketing? And do you think that that’s sustainable as you move into utopia and star in the next 12 to 18 months?
