VibeGuy

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.

The concentrate in question is not a cold brew. It’s a 20-32:1 dilution shelf-stable abomination that looks like used motor oil. No serious coffee company with pretensions of grandeur is in this space in North America - the Douwe Egberts business ended up in Folgers mitts and it’s the domain of second-tier convenience stores and mass foodservice. They do have a refrigerated concentrate that isn’t dreadful but that’s not what is plumbed onboard. Lavazza is just not in this space - this announcement is most likely only covering brewed and ready to drink products and I’d be surprised if any of the complimentary coffee in any venue has ever seen mainland Italy once this is deployed.

Vegetable beef soup?

I’ve held mine so long the stock could go negative, claimants could pierce the corporate veil and come knocking at my door, and I would grudgingly pay my proportionate share of their losses. For everybody gaming the system there are dozens of true believers and widows and orphans who bought the stock for the former dividend yield and can’t bear to realize the paper losses just yet. Also, individual shareholders make up a tiny fraction of the shareholder base - 15 out of 16 shares of Carnival are held by institutional investors or mutual funds, and they won’t be claiming the benefit.

About the infrastructure? Fact. The coffee areas are designed to rapidly dispense a mixture of hot water and concentrate. It would easily be $10k per station to rip out what’s there and replace it with the equipment used on Royal and beyond, which is a maintenance nightmare and cannot serve as many guests as quickly. Highly automated drip coffee systems combine the expense of automated espresso systems with the poor drinking experience of hastily-brewed drip and don’t generate incremental revenue like espresso bars do. I don’t see them doing it when I see thermal pots next to the disabled fancy equipment all the time on the newest ships. In the MDRs, I think the speed of service and ability to offer refills poured at table would probably point to large conventional brewers so the refit cost would be lower but you waste more coffee and quality suffers. Drip drinkers seem to have settled on the current product being drinkable vs the early hysteria around “syrup”. Lavazza does not make a concentrate suitable for the Douwe & Egbert system used on the earlier ships. In matters of taste, there can be no dispute, but I think the current offering is undrinkably bad as ristretti doppio despite nice machines that appear well maintained.

The 20-mile/cheap train trip doesn’t. The good one does. And it’s a cooperative agreement with CBP, CBSA and the railroad, not a legal requirement. I support it, but it’s for those parties’ convenience.

a few notes: RealID is not a passport or Birth Certificate substitute in this case and the Princess FAQs on the website make this painfully clear. Enhanced ID is a different thing issued by a few states on the northern border you can’t fly back from Vancouver on a BC or DL despite the US preclearance facility in the Vancouver airport. Air crossings require a passport with very, very limited exceptions that almost certainly do not apply here or you wouldn’t be asking the original question.

Ships prior to Royal will absolutely not be getting Lavazza for “drip” in the MDRs and buffets - the infrastructure is all designed for liquid concentrates that Lavazza doesn’t manufacture. The current no-name beans on Diamond and Discovery are perfectly adequate for drinks with milk and syrups and possibly ice. They make grim actual espresso. I’m thrilled for the change but would be happier if they went back to Illy.

Deposits aren’t an asset of the cruise line. Until they’re turned into an actual booking, since they can be refunded as cash at the expiration, they’re a liability (like any other loan). Carnival owes a *lot* of money and the interest rates aren’t great. This is a way to move the liabilities off the books sooner. I suspect the shelf-life of FCDs comes in about three flavors in the real world - ones that result in a new booking within 90 days, ones that result in a new booking for a sailing within a year of the cruise where it was purchased, and ones that expire. That last one is like those bananas you keep promising will be made into banana bread but end up throwing out anyway, and the costs (financial and administrative effort) associated with the latter can be reduced with shorter validity.

Whew. I was genuinely Not OK, and I have decades of professional experience as to why I don’t trust their app development partner.

And yet the very first question on the thread is thoroughly answered with references and context, inches above.

People ask the question. As I explained in the request for comment thread, the only lever Carnival has is to reduce the time period before sailings within which you have to prove ownership. I think the FAQ is painfully neutral about whether anyone should buy or hold Carnival Corporation & plc stock for any reason other than the shareholder benefit, and the shareholder benefit rules do not require you to keep the stock.

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.

I would specifically attend the blue/first time cruisers event because they typically give away Elite status to one attendee as a door prize. I’m not sure if it persists beyond that sailing, but it’s still 10% off shops and spa services and shore excursions and half off internet for that sailing if it’s purchased a la carte.