I mean - that's what they said was their target three months ago, so they are on pace. And the cruise business has always been a cash business of spending customer's money in advance, so that isn't anything new post-pandemic or alarming. Pre-pandemic they used to only keep about 0.25B of cash on hand, so they are actually flush with cash now! 😉 Obviously that plan didn't work out too well with the pandemic, but you can certainly undersand why a company would want to put that money to work versus just having it sitting around, waiting for a once-in-a-century event.
Costs sounded higher than they want (who's aren't these days?) but the rest of the figures seem to all be trending in the right direction for what amounts to a start up getting itself out of debt. On the call the CFO said the plan was to reach the same amount of leverage they had in 2019 by 2025. Given what the industry went through, I'm honestly surprised they'd be able to do that in three years. And Royal sounded even more aggressive with their EPS being back to 2019 levels by 2025. If NCLH debt levels get back to where they were in 2019 by 2025, and they don't buy back any stock between now and then, with ~2X the shares outsanding now versus pre-pandemic, that would put the stock price around $30ish in 2-3 years time, which from where it is today is a nice annual return.
As a (biased) long-term holder, I was content with the messaging.