VibeGuy

Whoops. I double-counted 13D/13F filers. Oopsie. I still only get 16% retail though. The Arison-related trusts get really complicated.

I think any whiff of doubt I had about Going Concern was dispelled by the market response to the latest bond offerings. The yield to maturity came in somewhat lower than sentiment expected. Again, operational profitability is decent - with numbers like these, I don’t think the fixed income crowd would get too upset if something happened and they had to take one more comparatively-expensive cash infusion.

Encouraging investors to hold stock for a period of time, for an off-the-books reward, violates securities laws. The shareholder benefit as constructed is about as restrictive as it can be. 93% of CCL stock is held by institutional shareholders who will never claim the benefit. The lines clearly see the marketing benefit and understand the costs underlying the redemption.

There are distinct differences between the Grand and the later builds. Grand, Sapphire, Diamond and Caribbean (and the former Golden and Star) are trivially different from each other. Crown/Emerald/Ruby have meaningful differences , especially above Aloha deck.

From the WSJ article: “Getting back to a balance sheet that looks like it did three years ago could easily take the rest of this decade and won’t be free of bumps, but a successful deleveraging could justify a share price two to 2½ times as high as today’s level even with the higher share count. Staying on board for that sort of compound annual return is worth a few bouts of seasickness.“ if it could easily take the rest of the decade, imagine how long it could take if it wasn’t easy. My guess is more like 10-11 years and I don’t see the progress as linear. As for the analyst call? I’ve seen fewer red flags at an actual bullfight. They continue to downgrade the guidance while swearing they’re turning the corner. Let’s assume they can double the share value by the end of the decade. My quick math says that’s 11% annual equity appreciation. Nothing in the current situation gives me confidence in that kind of yield year over year with this debt albatross around their neck and so many external forces pushing on costs and revenues. When Carnival Corp had a solid balance sheet and revenue growth and enough surplus liquidity to pay a dividend, I was very bullish on the stock. I literally suggested my elderly grandparents who were classic dividend investors buy some. People liked the product, the lines were operationally profitable, the balance sheet looked good, growth could come from both pricing power and gradual increases in capacity. Sure, there were macro pressures (fuel pricing was more impactful back then - smaller ships meant fewer guests to spread the fuel bill across) and it was still a consumer discretionary spend company, but it wasn’t a come-from-behind speculative play. This debt is crushing. Great people, a smarter executive team than in years past, probably improved cost discipline, a path to historical occupancy and pricing - like, operationally / EBITDA, I really don’t hate the company. But the margins make it really, really hard to service this debt, let alone retire it. Equity investments shouldn’t make small-time investors seasick for an 11% YOY return.

Channels like interline rates for airline industry, casino rates (but not comps), wholesales to incentive/promotional channels like land casinos - anything where they’re selling below advertised prices that the public can see. On some of the coastal repos in the next eight weeks, Princess has pricing in the opaque channels as low as $10/day PPDO while the public channels are closer to $60-70.

Excluding aft balconies and full suites on either ship, I don’t believe there’s a smaller balcony on any Grand/Gem Class ship than 90% of the balconies on a Royal class ship. An Aloha/Marina/Riviera balcony on Grand/Gem is demonstrably deeper.

My guess of 4-5 weeks of OBC to offset risk in the near term is based on the vaguely optimistic notion that the stock has found the bottom. While it’s *possible* that it could drop below that, I think it’s *unlikely*. I don’t think you need to cover the full cost of the unit with OBC to make the purchase vaguely prudent. Just a lot of it.

would it give you more pleasure than lighting five hundred dollar bills on fire? Because that’s roughly what you’d lose if the stock reverts to the 52-week low. In terms of investment potential, the stock is a dog and it doesn’t matter how cheap you get the dog. Now is just as good of a time as almost any to buy a volatile stock with crap fundamentals. If you have four or five weeks of Carnival Corporation cruises sailing in the next few months, absolutely, this likely isn’t the worst time to buy. But you need the OBC to make the short term volatility and structural risk of the investment make sense. If you’re bound and determined to join this parade of volatility and woe, do it the cheapest way possible. Today it’s 10% cheaper to buy CUK (A US-traded version of the London traded Carnival plc stock) than the more commonly held CCL. You get all of the OBC benefits and reduce your downside risk 10% in real dollars because you have less on the table to lose completely. Don’t just take my word for it. Of the twenty-one analysts making recommendations on Carnival stock, six think you should buy more and fifteen think you shouldn’t. Of those fifteen, four think you should actually sell what you already have.

Padgett has previously said their goal is 80% of pax on Plus or Premium and I can totally see it happening. I’m actually of the belief that they can exceed that with the switch to allowing onboard upgrades.

Here’s my perspective as someone who no longer sails fewer than two segments at a time: 1) Yes, a little. True 14-night sailings do get passengers into a groove and reduce the workload on some customer-facing staff and crew. Changing out the majority of the passengers every seven days does affect the vibe. I wouldn’t say that there’s less excitement at sailaway - people who enjoy sailaway are probably happy to get twice as much. My idea of the perfect sailaway is probably different than the majority view. 2) The MDR menus do repeat. This has upsides (yay, porcini mushroom soup again!) and downsides (ugh, the sailaway dinner menu *again*, which I’ve seen in substantially indistinguishable variations since the last big menu update ca 2009). However, with paid alternative venues, on-deck dining, the buffet and sometimes just snacky grazing, I really don’t get bored by it (and we have done five or six 7NTs in a string) because I gave up on my previous insistence on MDR dinners most nights. 3) Absolutely not. They still desire to extract maximum revenue from newly-boarding passengers. Actual entertainment policies vary, and we’ve had them vary from sailing to sailing on the same ship, so there’s no predicting. Guest entertainers may or may not swap out.

I agree that export financing is going to be key to sustained fleet renewal. I also agree that the interest pressure is really coming from debt they’ve already accrued and have to hope they can refinance it at more commercially advantageous terms. While it’s not bad to have the lowest debt:revenue ratio of the peer group (as I mutter something about being the skinniest person at WeightWatchers), in absolute terms, their debt:income ratio is so wildly different from the historical norms that I’m still struggling to see how they dig out in seven or eight years. That’s an investment horizon beyond many equity investors’ comfort level. The amazing thing about the hotel sector is how operators have been able to get monster REVPAR growth while delivering a substantially degraded cost-reduced product, and it’s not just in full-service/upper upscale, it’s in virtually every segment from roadside exterior-corridor to top tier luxury. People want to go somewhere and they’re biting the bullet and doing so. The cruise business just isn’t seeing that kind of pricing power for whatever reasons and, more importantly, they can’t rapidly pivot costs the way land-based operators can. I like the product, I think Princess is doing a great job onboard, I think Carnival Corporation is a lousy investment over the foreseeable future. All of these things can be true simultaneously.

The sailings *I’ve been on* have not been at 98 - and I make no claims they are representative at all. I’m saying I’ve been onboard across a range of occupancy and staffing levels, when there were more crew than guests as well as getting up to normal-ish occupancy, and the onboard experience has been consistently excellent. What they’re putting out should be perceived by guests as highly desirable. It’s absolutely not meant to cast any doubt on their reported results, and it’s not meant to be indicative in any way of how they’re executing from a sales perspective fleetwide. The onboard product is excellent and it’s on sales and marketing activity to get butts in those beds. GAAP results are what ultimately matters and the company is providing guidance that they’re still going to have a loser of a fiscal year despite being at or above historical occupancy levels and getting higher per diem revenue, and that’s barring any further macro pressure that hits all of leisure. If they can’t make a buck under GAAP despite returning to historical occupancy levels and having record on board revenue per guest night, I guess it’s the old saw of “we lose a little money on every transaction but we make it up in volume”. Potential investors should know that the path to real profitability, not BS EBITDA “profitability” is somewhere between uncertain and highly speculative. The only real hope is eventual interest rate relief (assuming the company is still seen as an average or better credit risk). The Street saw right through the booking and EBITDA happy talk and sent the stock down 5% on an overall up day for the market.

They’ve already got committed business with the yards - they’re slowing CapEx but they fundamentally understand that they have to operate more “efficient” ships (not just fuel, but more paying customers for the relatively fixed number of officers and expensive staff that it takes to run a ship of any size). Cutting CapEx in dry dock/updates is smart, but the pressure on the mass market brands to at least incrementally increase ship size is both fundamental and relentless. Princess doesn’t necessarily have to be the first or even primary beneficiary. HAL’s cost structure has dramatically changed through fleet renewal but could still improve. I think the lower hanging fruit is getting either getting CCL to a “per diem fixed cost per lower berth parity” with MSC, NCL and RCI or find pricing power that I don’t think is there. If I were running a major cruise holding company, I would have to wonder (a lot) about how the lodging industry has dealt with capital costs vs operating results by using REIT and management company structures to divorce the real estate assets from making the beds and serving up breakfast. As an investor, I’d actually consider investing in a REIT-like structure that contracts for the build, owns and runs the maritime operations of ships on a long term semi-wet charter basis. The actual “cruise line” operations (hotel functions, marketing, etc) have fundamentally different pressures and opportunities, and the markets could more easily independently value their worth. This asset-lite model is now the de facto structure in lodging. Ultimately, there’s one single reason CUK is one of three single equities in my portfolio: the annual value of the shareholder OBC is greater than the cost of the stock - because we’re onboard 75-90 days a year. It’s that transactional. The debt, the dilution, the unimpressive recovery, the segment-wide pressures, the analyst sentiment, the fundamentals - there are way better places to put your money, IMHO, if the goal is income or equity appreciation.

Excellent detective work. My handy three-step test for PVSA compliance starts with: 1) Does the PVSA apply because the chain of voyages both starts and ends in a U.S. port? You answered Yes, so we go on to Question 2 2) Are the start and end ports of the chain of voyages different US ports? You answered No, and that makes the chain of voyages de facto compliant. For those new to this, the government has determined that passengers who start and end at the same port aren’t actually being transported, no matter where they go in the meantime. Enjoy your cruises!

I’m also curious. I assume he’s been at the same table with the staff-generated same time:same table reservation type, and they’ve made some minor adjustment, but I have *never* seen an onboard activity from any department other than Future Cruise generate a guest-facing email.

The onboard product has to dazzle, and I think it’s doing that, especially in the eyes of new customers to the line. I’ve spent, what, pushing six months onboard since the restart, with occupancies ranging from 28% to juuuuuust brushing 90%. Anecdotally, I think people new to Princess are really enjoying themselves onboard. The hospitality feels genuine and cutbacks that are obvious to veteran cruisers honestly don’t impact the new blood all that hard. Some things are dramatically better, even. If the lines of Carnival are smart (and I’ve never thought they were dumb) they’re looking at sat survey data through the lens of relatively new cruisers and those who have switched lines from peer competitors, and Princess is probably meeting or exceeding expectations across the board. Hang the diehards. Carnival Corp has a very very short runway to convert a portion of these new guests to diehards - that’s the work of the debt monkey on their back and the fleet renewals that get more expensive to build every day that goes by - macroeconomic pressures all. But I maintain my position that the call center being good is one of the least important factors in doing so.

Fleetwide utilization of 95% is still abysmal. They can happy-talk the performance vs 2019 all they want but they have a fundamentally different operating cost environment and an unrecognizable debt picture versus the glory days when they printed money. This summer is going to be extremely telling. Other players in travel and hospitality have some of their strongest advance indicators in history (US-Europe flight reservations are 22% ahead of average with fares *33%* ahead, Disney is well above pre-pandemic levels, etc). The only solution to the woes at Carnival Corp is more butts in beds. It’s far more critical to recoup those relatively fixed per-voyage operating expenses (fuel and crew) from incremental added passengers than find gains in onboard revenue (selling Plus to people who don’t drink and are bad at math).

The benefit information on the IR site hadn’t been updated. The Annual Report had been. https://www.carnivalcorp.com/static-files/ef80ac8c-e40e-42ad-ba8e-62a02fb13d6d - Page 5.

Imagine if there were an FAQ about the shareholder benefit . . . First, the annual report is already out. In the FAQ “Information and the benefit itself are subject to change yearly - this document was last updated March 23, 2023 with information from the 2022 annual report issued February 28, 2023, and is valid for sailings through July 31, 2024.” Regarding the renewal: 4.7 Will Carnival Corporation & plc keep the Shareholder Benefit in the future? Since the introduction of the benefit decades ago, the benefit has been renewed annually. The benefit has been renewed in each of the four Carnival annual reports issued since COVID began affecting the cruise industry (2019’s report issued after the Diamond Princess was already quarantined, 2020, 2021 and 2022, issued 02/28/2023) despite the financial position of the industry as a whole and Carnival in particular. That said, there are no guarantees and you’re under no obligation to continue to hold the stock after the benefit is discontinued. The exhaustive FAQ that one user was delightful enough to call a “major waste of space” can be found at https://boards.cruisecritic.com/topic/2925912-princess-specific-carnival-corp-plc-shareholder-benefit-faq/ Imagine that.

What’s the benefit to Princess of improving pre-cruise customer support for people who have already booked? The line has made a decision about how to resource pre-cruise post-purchase support and it’s roughly as good as it has to be. If you don’t get your question about, say, specialty dining answered correctly and promptly pre-cruise, is that really going to change your spend? I doubt it. It will get answered onboard and they’ll book the revenue and they didn’t spend $5 more per call to get a concierge-level experience. I don’t mean to be cynical, but “barely adequate” is good enough to sell the ships to 120%. As a shareholder I’m fine with it. Every cranky person who wants an answer over the phone is likely to no longer be physically able to sail sooner than the new customers who avail themselves of self-service or social media channels for inquiries.

With Clear and Pre✅, you have as close to a guarantee as possible. For the smoothest experience, once you’re on the highway, start looking at the airport webcams. If Departures are backed up, check Arrivals. If Arrivals are backed up, too, have the driver pull into the garage and proceed to the skybridge nearest your airline. While one of you deals with the luggage, stick the parking ticket in the payment machine and it will give 15 minutes to exit free. This can dramatically speed your access to check-in/bag drop.

There ended up not being enough space for the Windex locker. An unfortunate oversight. (In reality you cannot believe how expensive and heavy clear pianos are, and they never sound as good as the identical mechanicals sound in something else. Further, they are incredibly easy to scratch - having them out where people wearing rings and watches could touch them or brush up against them in riveted jeans or with a handbag? Oh god. You’d have to continuously play Chopin continuously to get that much Polish on them. <badumtiss>

An overwhelming majority of the people on the chat have never ever been within 1000 miles of a Princess ship. They make things up to get people off the chat and off the phone with impunity. Telling people to chat Princess for guidance about the onboard experience is like asking the fattest person at Weight Watchers for advice on the best brands of skinny jeans. To the OP: yes.

And for the very frequent traveler who needs visas that take forever to get issued or who must have a valid passport with them at all times as a condition of employment, a second passport book costs exactly the same as a first one, but is only valid for four years. The passport service offices are filled with some of the nicest, most helpful people in the federal government, but the back office processes have become unwieldy and the prices have escalated much faster than inflation. This leads to a situation where you either chuck a lot of money down a hallway and there’s no guarantees as to when results will show up, or you chuck double the amount across a counter in one of a handful of metropolitan areas and have a new book in a definite time because you have urgent international travel and can’t be hanging out to dry.