嘉年華遊輪 (CCL) 2013 Q1 法說會逐字稿

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by.

Welcome to the Carnival first-quarter 2013 earnings conference call.

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As a reminder, this conference is being recorded Friday, March 15, 2013.

I would now like to turn the conference over to Howard Frank, Vice Chairman and Chief Operating Officer.

Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you Suzie.

Good morning everyone.

First, apologies for the short notice on this call.

We did -- I think in light of recent ship incident events, we wanted to connect up to the investment community as soon as possible.

So we put out the press release and we announced the call rather quickly.

We wanted to get the information out there and to make sure everybody's up-to-date on the impact -- the potential impact of these events on our business.

With me this morning is Micky Arison, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; David Bernstein, our Senior Vice President of Finance and Chief Financial Officer; and Beth Roberts, our Vice President of Investor Relations, along with me.

And to start off the call, I'll have David take you through the first quarter and then he'll send it back to me and I'll have some comments on the outlook for 2013 and also make a few comments about the recent ship incidents.

David?

Thank you Howard.

Before I begin, please note that some of our remarks on this conference call will be forward-looking.

I will refer you to the cautionary statements in today's press release.

Also, all of my references to revenue and cost metrics will be in local currencies unless otherwise noted, as this is a much more useful measure of business strength.

Our non-GAAP EPS for the first quarter was $0.08 per share.

The first quarter came in $0.03 above the midpoint of our December guidance despite a $0.02 impact from voyage disruptions and related repair costs which Howard will discuss later in his comments.

The improvement was primarily driven by lower net cruise costs without fuel were $0.04 a share as a result of the timing for certain expenses, primarily between the first and second quarter.

Now, let's take a look at the first-quarter operating results versus the prior year.

Our capacity increased 3.9%.

North American brands were up 3.1% while the Europe, Australia, and Asia brands, or as we call them our EAA brands, were up 5.1%, driven by a 17% increase in AIDA.

Our total net revenue yields in the first quarter declined 2.3% from last year's strong pre-Concordia yields that were up almost 3%.

Now, let's take a look at the two components of net revenue yields.

Our net ticket yields declined 3.3%.

Our EAA brands were down 5.8%, driven by declines in European, South American itineraries that were partially offset by increases in Caribbean itineraries.

The North American brands were down only 1.5% with two-thirds of their capacity in the Caribbean during the first quarter.

For net onboard and other yields, the increase was 1% with increases in the North American brands that were partially offset by declines in the EAA brands driven by Costa.

On the cost side, net cruise costs per available lower berth day, excluding fuel, were down 3% versus the prior year.

The decline was more than we expected in our December guidance.

As I have said in the past, it's difficult to estimate the timing of many of the expenses by quarter, and therefore the best measure of net cruise cost performance is on an annual basis.

As a result of our ongoing efforts to reduce fuel usage, our consumption per ALBD declined almost 5% this quarter, consistent with our full-year guidance.

Something I don't often get to say, fuel prices this quarter were down over 4% versus the prior year, which saved us $0.03 per share.

In summary, the first quarter non-GAAP EPS was $0.06 higher than 2012 earnings of $0.02 per share.

This was driven by lower net cruise costs, partially offset by lower net revenue yield.

Now, turning to our 2013 outlook, I will skip net revenue yields, as Howard will discuss that shortly.

For the full year, net cruise costs, excluding fuel, per ALBD are forecasted to be a 2.5% to 3.5% versus the prior year.

This is about 1 percentage point higher than our December guidance, driven by the voyage disruptions and related repair costs as well as additional expenses relating to certain vessel enhancements for the remainder of the fleet that Howard will expand upon.

At this point, I will turn the call back over to Howard.

Thank you David.

I will have comments later I my talk about the Triumph incident, but let me first start by bringing you up-to-date on wave bookings.

This is based on the nine weeks of booking activity from January 6 through March 10, the latest booking data we have.

On a fleet-wide basis, bookings during the wave period have been running well ahead of last year.

And this includes Costa's bookings, which are also significantly higher year-over-year.

But even taking Costa's bookings out of the data, bookings for the rest of the fleet have still been running well ahead year-on-year.

Fleet-wide pricing on wave bookings is slightly ahead year-over-year with and without Costa in the mix.

Breaking this down by major markets, North America bookings have been running higher during this period with slightly higher pricing.

EAA bookings are substantially higher, with or without Costa in the mix, at slightly lower pricing.

While the significantly higher EAA booking volumes are very encouraging, as I will comment on later, with the exception of Costa, we are still well behind in EAA bookings for the remainder of the year at the present time.

We have also gathered booking data since the Triumph incident which covers the last three weeks through March 10.

On a fleet-wide basis, taking Carnival Cruise Lines out of the mix which I will comment on separately, booking volumes have continued to run significantly higher year-over-year.

North America Brand booking volume continued to run higher although lower than for the period prior to the Triumph incident with pricing higher year-over-year.

The EAA booking volumes continued to be very strong year-over-year with pricing running higher during this three-week period.

Please keep in mind that we consider this latest three weeks of booking data as anecdotal, but we decided to provide the information in anticipation of questions about booking trends after the incident.

For the Carnival Cruise Lines brand, booking volumes and pricing for the period of the wave prior to the incident were running nicely higher year-over-year.

Carnivals booking volumes for the three-week period after the event were lower.

However, with Carnival's introduction of new marketing promotions in recent weeks, the market has responded positively and booking volumes have significantly recovered.

We expect Carnival's bookings to continue to improve and normalize over the next several weeks.

It's difficult to estimate the impact that the recent Carnival Dream event will have on bookings.

Normally, a short or intermittent power outage in port would not have received media attention.

However, given the media coverage of the event, it may have some effect on bookings and we have factored that into our revenue yield and earnings guidance.

Based on the foregoing trends in the booking patterns, we have lowered constant currency revenue yield estimates for the remainder -- for the year by 1.5%.

As indicated in the press release, first-quarter yields came in as expected.

For the remainder of the year, continued softness in European brand pricing is driving some of the forecasted lower revenue yield outlook.

Other contributing factors include slightly lower revenue yields for the Carnival Cruise Lines brand resulting from current and anticipated price promotions.

We've also reduced forecasted fleet-wide onboard revenue for the remainder of the year.

Turning to the current booking status for the remaining three quarters on a fleet-wide basis, bookings are behind last year at slightly lower pricing.

North American brands bookings are behind at slightly higher pricing, for EAA brands bookings are behind at lower pricing.

On a quarter-by-quarter basis, the trends are also quite similar.

So you won't see much difference if we provided -- if we broke out this information by the second, third, and fourth quarter, which we will not do on this call.

Breaking this down by major programs for North American brands, pricing for Caribbean and Alaska programs is slightly higher year-over-year on lower occupancies.

Pricing for North America premium brand European cruises is higher at slightly higher year-over-year occupancies.

For EAA brand, the European cruises, which are the great majority of their itineraries for the next three quarters, pricing and occupancies are lower year-over-year.

It's clear that continued softness in European economies and lower consumer confidence throughout Europe is a primary contributor to the closer-in booking pattern and lower prices we are experiencing.

However, as previously said, we are experiencing a significant uptick in European brand bookings, which is a very encouraging sign.

Based on our latest forecast on a fleet-wide basis, we are expecting revenue yields in the second quarter to be down slightly and for the second half of the year to be slightly higher.

Full-year earnings guidance has been revised to a range of $1.80 to $2.10 per share or a midpoint of $1.95.

The $0.35 per share reduction from our original December guidance is comprised of $0.10 of costs for the Triumph incident, including repair costs and estimated revenue loss from canceled sailings.

Reduced fleet-wide ticket forecasts for the remaining three quarters contributed $0.14 of the decline, approximately half of the revenue yield reductions for Europe brands and half for North American brands, including Carnival.

We've also reduced our onboard revenue yield forecast by $0.06 and we have added $0.05 per share for costs associated with modifications to ships this year to enhance ship operating system redundancies and improve emergency power.

We also expect this work to continue on the fleet through 2014.

A few comments about the Carnival Triumph incident that I want to make.

Although there are many lessons to be learned from the incident, it is important to understand that our fire suppression systems did work and our crew did a superb job.

The ship's systems and crew were able to quickly respond to the fire and extinguish it, so there were no injuries to either passengers or crew.

Although our emergency generator power was not adequate to provide effective passenger comfort, the emergency systems we had onboard are in accordance with and in fact go beyond the latest regulatory guidelines.

But having said that, we will make the changes necessary to provide even greater redundancies to our shipboard systems.

And in the event of a loss of power, we increase the emergency generator power to provide a more effective level of comfort to the passengers and crew on the ship.

An assessment of shipboard redundancies and emergency generator power will be carried out on a corporate-wide basis for our entire fleet.

And accordingly, enhancements will be implemented on all ships in the fleet.

In this regard, our corporate maritime policy department, together with the maritime executives at the brands, have already made preliminary assessments of the ships in the fleet and plans are underway to make the appropriate modifications.

This project of course will take some time to complete, but I want to assure you that we will address these issues as quickly as feasibly possible.

Having said all this, I want to emphatically state that all of the ships in our fleet are safe and the work we are planning will add further enhancement to the safety systems already in place.

Given all the misconceptions about the causes of the Triumph incident, let me make it perfectly clear, our ships are built not just to be in compliance with regulations, whether IMO, FLAG or Classification Society, but many instances go beyond regulatory requirements.

Our corporate and brand management teams will continue to focus on ship safety as their first priority.

And with that, Suzie, I'm going to turn it back to you to take questions so we can take some questions from the listeners.

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Felicia Hendrix, Barclays Capital.

Howard, thank you for the detail that you gave us.

And you did mention that your guidance does anticipate some impact from the Dream, but I wanted to talk more about just specific costs that you might have.

You know, you kind of just walked us through the detail behind your earnings.

I'm just wondering.

Specifically, is there anything in there for -- the Dream is going to be out of service a little bit.

Anything in there?

Today, there was the incident with the Legend.

Then also, given these three events in such a short time period, just wondering what the cost, incremental cost impact might be from your marketing and your promotional activities, and more broadly how we should think about your marketing budget over the next 12 months.

Well, I'll take the first --

Do you want to take the costs part?

-- on the costs on the Dream and also Carnival Legend.

We have factored in the costs of the Dream being out of service.

They did refund a portion of this cruise and they also canceled one cruise.

That is in our numbers.

And as far as the Legend is concerned, we're very hopeful that it will sail its normal itinerary on its next itinerary next week.

And sales and marketing --?

I think sales and marketing, I don't think we're going to see a huge increment, any significant increment in sales and marketing that will not be easily absorbed in the numbers that we have already budgeted or forecasted for sales and marketing costs in what we gave you.

I do think that there will be price promotions that we are using as part of the marketing programs and -- but that has been factored into the revenue yield forecast that we gave you.

So we think we've got the expense side of the ledger covered fairly easily by that right now.

Okay.

And then for both of you I guess, just on maintenance CapEx, I think it's been running around $700 million, $750 million.

Is that a number we should see increase?

Well, we've said a number of times in the past that historically our maintenance CapEx had been in the $400 million, $500 million range and that we were increasing it.

It was up more recently like $600 million plus.

And all of the forecasts we've been giving you have been $800-plus million and we were trying to factor in all the refurbishments and all of the things that we need to do to keep the ships up-to-date.

So --

But there will be some incremental capital expenditures as we make these enhancements to -- whatever enhancements need to be made so the redundancy, increased redundancy and for the expanded emergency generation power.

I don't think we really have our arms around that number yet.

That's what we're working on to get.

And hopefully, in the next couple of weeks, we'll have a full plan with estimated costs of doing all this work.

But I don't see it as being enormous, but it will be some amount of money and it will be probably incurred during the next two years, 2013 and 2014.

Okay.

So just to understand, David, you said the maintenance CapEx has more recently been running around $600 million but you've been giving us a number around $800 million.

Yes.

$800-plus million has been included in all future CapEx numbers that we've been giving you for probably the past year or so now.

Yes.

Okay, so is it possible that that kind of absorbs maybe the incremental costs you might see from refurbishing your fleet?

Or will it be incremental over that?

As Howard indicated, there might be some incremental that we might spend, but it should be manageable.

I know we've got a lot of work (multiple speakers) most of it I would imagine (multiple speakers)

That $800 million number had a lot of cushion in there.

So we should be fine.

Yes.

Okay thank you.

Harry Curtis, Nomura Securities.

Of the $800 million that you mentioned, how much of that is pure refurbishment or pure maintenance CapEx versus sort of incremental refurbishment?

What I'm trying to get at is, in other industries that we look at, we look at maintenance CapEx as a percentage of revenues to capture kind of the utilization.

And given your high occupancy, you're pushing these assets really hard.

And so what I'm trying to get at it, as a percentage of revenues, are you spending as much on these ships as you did 10 years ago?

Yes, it's like you're saying.

We are clearly spending more, but it's hard to look as a percentage of revenue unfortunately.

Our yields are down since 2008, but overall, on a per-berth basis, we recognize that the fleet has gotten a little bit older than it was 10 or 15 years ago when we were spending more to properly maintain it.

We don't have the detailed split between refurbishment and other types of maintenance.

These are very high-level numbers that we worked with various operating companies to put together and, each year, we put together very detailed plans.

Much of the maintenance cost is period-expensed, even in the drydocks, so we don't capitalize that.

We only capitalize improvements that we make to the ship as part of a drydock.

I think most of it is all these other items.

But the maintenance work is the expense item.

Yes, we don't even capitalize the drydock.

That's all expense.

That answers your question Harry.

I mean, sorry.

Well, the follow-up is if you could give us some sense of how many more days in drydock you have built into your forecast this year and next and how does that compare to the last two to three years?

Hang on one second.

Yes, whatever you had.

I guess where I'm going with this --

Yes (multiple speakers) the current --

Are you talking about incremental drydocks as a result of the additional work?

Or is this planned drydocks that we already have in place?

What I'm trying to get at is planned drydocks, how that's likely to grow in 2013 and 2014.

Yes, we don't -- we haven't -- we don't have the 2014 and beyond schedule here.

The drydock days between 2013 -- 2012 and 2013 --- I mean our ships go into drydock on a very routine basis, on schedule, either twice every five years or once every three years.

There's different rules we follow.

So, it's scheduled out and we'll keep looking at that and taking into consideration the enhancements that Howard had indicated.

We'll make changes as necessary.

There may be a few additional changes this year, but we don't know for sure yet because, as Howard said, we are not done with the overall plan.

You see, a lot of this additional work that we will carry out will depend on a number of factors that we don't necessarily have control of, including the availability of drydock space in the various dry docks around the world and the logistics of if equipment needs to be made, new equipment needs to be made, the manufacturer of that equipment as well as the installation of that equipment by the teams that do this sort of stuff.

So, and we still don't have a full story on that.

So as soon as we get it, we'll probably start to share that with people.

We don't have our arms around it yet.

And at this stage, we don't even know what work can be done at service of versus when it needs to be drydocked.

It's just too early.

To give you an idea, in 2013, we had 425 drydock days planned in our overall guidance.

Okay.

So I guess the last question is, based on your maintenance CapEx estimate which you built-in for drydock, you're pretty comfortable that there is plenty of room there for whatever else may happen to your fleet.

Actually, what I said is that as soon as we get -- we get to put the fleet-wide plan into effect, we'll have a better handle on what that amount is and know to what extent we've covered that in the $800 million.

And the $0.05 that Howard mentioned, the vessel enhancements, that -- we did our best to represent on a very preliminary basis what we think it could be for 2013.

But it is very preliminary.

While I've got you on the phone here, let me just say, for future questions, can we limit it to two?

I know there are a lot of people out there that want -- have questions, so let's limit the questions to two.

And at the end, if there are more questions, we can take them, if people want to have third questions.

Steve Wieczynski, Stifel.

Good morning guys.

This is actually Brad in for Steve.

You called out some onboard softness in your revised guidance.

I just wanted to see if you're seeing that in any particular areas or if it was sort of widespread across all the onboard categories.

Well, what we actually said is that we expected -- we still expect onboard to be up this year, just not as much as we had anticipated in the December guidance.

We saw the onboards were only up 1% in the first quarter.

So, as a result, we just took down the second, third, and fourth quarter a little bit from previous guidance.

But all the major categories are still expected to be up for the year, just not as much as we had previously anticipated.

Okay, that's great.

And then the second one, I couldn't help but notice that the guidance range is still at $0.30 -- the spread there.

I'm just curious if you could give us some color as to what gets you to $2.10 versus $1.80.

And that's it for me.

Thanks.

Yes, I think it's just a function of the yield guidance primarily.

And given the uncertainty, the economic uncertainty in Europe and all recent events, we thought the $0.30 range was appropriate.

Okay, perfect.

Thanks guys.

Greg Badishkanian, Citigroup.

My two questions are how aggressive do you think you'll need to be over the next few weeks, the next few months in terms of pricing to encourage bookings?

And have any of your competitors responded so far?

You know, what tends to happen during waves period everybody is kind of on sale in some form or another to encourage sales during wave.

And just like past years, all of our competitors have been on sale as we have.

So, it's really hard to tell whether there is a response or not.

I would say that we are encouraged that, based on the fact that when Carnival Cruise Lines did put price promotions in effect, that the response was good.

And I don't have yesterday's data but for the week, this week through Wednesday, Carnival Cruise Lines booking levels were actually up 25% versus last year.

Now, that was in response to a promotion, but we're not anticipating that the promotions will be much deeper than they were last year.

Great, thank you.

Tim Conder, Wells Fargo Securities.

Howard and everyone, thanks for the color that you can give us on the outlook with the ships.

But any quantification at this point or number of ships that will require major impact?

You said you're reviewing the whole fleet, but any color, especially in the Carnival and Costa brands?

I mean I think, Tim, I prefer to have it all in front of me in a comprehensive way.

I'll have a better sense of it.

Our sense is that we're going to pull that together in the next couple of weeks.

And I'd rather provide it when I know it's actually going to be.

There are a number of different ways also to make the modifications.

And it really depends on how they select the modifications to be made on the ships that will determine the costs associated with it.

So, let's see what they come up with first.

I don't want to jump ahead of it.

I did mention that the Carnival ship that was affected, the Triumph, there are a number of ships like that in the fleet.

So that will probably be dealt with first, but there may be some other lesser modifications that we may have to make in the rest of the fleet.

We'll see how that goes.

Okay.

And then, when you have a little bit more color over the next several weeks, do you anticipate doing another update type of call at that point in time?

If we have something to say, we will.

Yes, if we have something.

I think if there's something material to say, we will say it.

Okay.

Shifting to -- for my second question, shifting to another question here on Europe, comparing to your commentary that you gave in December, can you maybe give us a little bit more color on the UK, Germany, and then Italy and the southern issues I guess for the overall continent?

Well, in the UK as well as in Germany, beginning last year, we started to see a fallback in bookings so that the bookings curve start to come closer in.

We didn't move pricing all that much, thinking that the bookings would come in later, that the specialty bookings for the holiday booking (technical difficulty) spring and summer and early fall.

And that's -- and while the bookings have improved in those two countries, we are still seeing that.

So, and pricing actions were taken in order to maintain some relative full occupancies on the ships.

So that caused some of the dislocation.

We still see that, but we are, as I mentioned on the call, on my comments, that more recently, we've seen a dramatic catch up on bookings.

Now, whether we can catch up fully quickly enough is another question to maintain better pricing as we get closer to the departure, the ship's departure.

I think we did say on the prior call that because of the closer-in booking pattern in Europe, it was making forecasting European yields much more difficult.

Costa's bookings, which primarily covers Italy, France, Germany and Spain, they were more -- their strategy was to get out ahead of this a little bit.

And so their occupancies are more or less I think in line with the prior year and maybe starting to pull ahead.

So, there's a potential that they may be able to start to move pricing up.

So they are in a little bit better shape relative to -- from a bookings curve standpoint relative to the rest of the group.

But we're also struggling, to be honest with you, with the uncertainties in Italy right now, which is their major, most significant market.

But the Costa brand, I must say they haven't lost market share in Italy.

They are doing -- they maintained it, maybe even increased marketshare this past year.

So the business is getting back on track.

We're very encouraged by what we see from the Costa organization, and certainly we've seen some significant rise in perceptions about the brand in Italy and Europe and so we started to see a recovery happen.

Probably would like to see the recovery happen faster in terms of pricing, but we haven't -- we will have pricing improvement this year, perhaps not as much as we originally thought.

And that's one of the factors that took down some pricing for our European brand forecasts on revenue yields for the remainder of the year.

Clearly, the uncertainty really isn't helping with the situation with the government basically at a stalemate; that's not helping either.

We had anticipated the tough economic environment in December, but it's just turning out to be a little tougher than we had thought.

And Spain continues to be a challenge.

But fortunately for us in Spain, we have a small Spanish cruise line, Ibero, as you know.

Actually, they're going to do better this year, we think, than they did last year because it is a small cruise line and we're finding ways to source business from countries outside of Spain to help pull the ships.

With Michael Thamm there, he's changed around the sourcing strategies so that we are hopeful that that will start to change around quickly, the Spanish side.

So, David, your comment is that Europe tougher than thought collectively or Italy -- was that, David, was a comment you made there?

I think it was probably southern Europe in general was tougher than we thought, but I think, overall, it was a bit tougher than we thought.

Okay, thank you gentlemen.

Robin Farley, UBS.

I just wanted to get a little more color.

I know you talked about the change in yield being half due to European demand and half due to the Carnival brand.

And so just when you're looking at your yield guidance for the second half of the year, you have that positive.

Can you give us a little color on what your assumptions are for -- does the Carnival brand turn positive in the second half of the year?

And then also, when you look at Europe, are the European sourcing brands positive in the second half of the year, kind of with or without Costa?

Or is the positive in the second half of the year all just the strength of North American brands outside of the Carnival brand that is offsetting declines?

Just trying to get a sense of what those pieces look like in the second half.

If you --

I don't know what David is about to say, but I hesitate to get into a brand-by-brand of discussion of yields.

Clearly, Costa -- we see Costa as having a positive year-over-year yield improvement and the rest of the European brands having lower yield over yield year-over-year improvement -- year-over-year yields.

Yes.

The yields for the back half in total or within our guidance are expected to be up.

We are expecting to see both North America and EAA up which -- but I will say that we have continued to say that EAA without Costa is a challenge because of the economic environment and the EAA yields without Costa probably will be down a tad for the back half of the year.

Okay, great.

Thank you.

Alexia Dogani, Liberum Capital.

I just had two questions as well.

Just firstly just the maintenance CapEx spend of the $700 million to $800 million, I know that question perhaps has been asked, but I want to explore it in a different way.

Can you split the spend between the hotel aspect, so how much you invest to bring the product up to the new shape and the core operational elements?

And following on from that, the $0.05 of the maintenance cost increase this year, you said this will continue for the next two years.

So year three, should we expect that sort of spend to disappear, if you like?

And then my second question is whether you can give us a bit of a feel on how emerging markets are performing and what percent of your capacity is allocated in 2013 and what trends you're seeing there, both from the revenue and the cost side?

Thanks.

That's more than two questions, by the way.

I think David said already that the $800 million is a top line number.

We don't do the detailed analysis of that until we get through the budget cycle, so that is just a kind of over-the-top number.

I would like to reiterate Howard's earlier comments that a lot of our R&M goes through operating expense because we do heavy refurbishment when the ship is in-service.

That is a big percentage of ship operating costs.

And as far as the $0.05 is concerned, it was simply our preliminary best guess of additional expense this year.

We don't have the plan, as Howard mentioned, for all of the ships.

Once we have that, we'll have a much better idea what kind of P&L impact.

But I think it's fair to say that the majority of what we expect to spend will be capital and give us some time to put that together.

And if we have something material to say, we will announce it once we get it.

I mean, to some degree, if we are -- we accelerate drydock work in order to get work done more quickly.

In a way it's just moving expense a little bit earlier and saving on it later on because it would be the timing of a drydock -- a drydock on a ship that we might otherwise do in 2015 if we move it up to 2013 because it works in terms of the availability of the dock and the equipment we need, we'll just -- we won't have to do that drydock in 2015.

We'll have already done it in 2000.

So there's a little bit of movement of expenses and the timing of expenses that's going to happen in the next couple of years.

And I could try to give you a sense as to what's going to carry over from year to year, very difficult right now.

It's just all very preliminary.

Your question on the emerging market sourcing, basically looking outside of North America and Western Europe, the emerging markets are about 14% of our guest source.

And overall, we are very pleased and it's doing very well around the world, all of those markets.

Okay thank you.

Lena Thakkar, HSBC.

I understand the comments around costs.

I just wanted to get a feel of -- given everything that's been said on the $0.10 impact from the Triumph and some of the one-offs that you outlined at the previous set of results, should we be thinking of net crew costs actually going down next year, all things being equal from here, or is there anything else we should be aware of going into the next financial year?

And then just on the revenue guidance, I know you can't break it down by brand, but I wonder if you could tell us if your guidance still factors in positive yields in North America ex-Carnival?

Well, the answer to the second question is yes, it does factor in all yields, positive and negative, for the brands.

So yes, the revenue guidance has everything in it.

In terms of costs going down in 2014, I think it's too early to say.

I think, as I mentioned before, we really need to get the plan in place to understand it better and the associated costs that are connected with the plan for all of the ship work we are going to be doing and then we'll have a better sense of as to when it's going to happen.

But my guess is we're going to see costs like this occur because this work is going to be carried out mostly in 2013 and 2014, so I really don't see that aspect of our costs going down.

Okay.

Just to follow-up on the yield question, I guess the question is more getting at have the recent issues caused an impact on just the Carnival brand or all of the North American brands?

So is this isolated to one brand and therefore does the guidance still assume yields up for everything else apart from Carnival in North America?

Well, we did see -- during the period of the incident itself and for a week or two thereafter, we saw a little bit of some of the other brands felt a little bit of a hiccup I would call it, but not a major issue.

And then it seems to have -- now things seem to be back on track.

So, I hope that answers your question.

But in terms of giving you specific guidance by brands, no, we're not prepared to do that.

Thank you.

Okay, thank you.

Jaime Katz, Morningstar.

Can you guys talk a little bit about how you might change your kind of marketing message to comfort consumers maybe?

And then also I know you guys didn't offer any information on the immediate impact the week after the Triumph but if you have any color on the magnitude of impact on bookings?

I know they bounced back.

That would be helpful.

Look.

I think, from the standpoint of marketing, they are making some modifications to their messaging and communications right now.

I think the issue of safety onboard the ships is more -- is less of a marketing issue but is more of a communications and public relations issue.

And, clearly, we've got advisors who are working with us on putting out the positive messages about the actions we're going to be taking to strengthen these areas of the ships and to improve further enhanced safety and so on.

And I think those messages will be going out from Carnival Cruise Lines over the next couple of months.

But my understanding is they are conducting consumer research right now to try to address the messaging appropriately.

Okay.

Yes, I think what's important to understand is that the millions of people who have come off the ship happy is our best marketing source.

And Carnival Cruise Lines has millions, literally millions of people coming off the ships every year very, very happy.

And two-thirds of the people are repeat passengers who understand how safe and how comfortable the product is.

And we expect them to continue to book, and the last few weeks have been great examples of how strong Carnival Cruise Lines brand is.

You know, the repeat passengers particularly understand when a good promotion is put in place and they jump on it and have a lot of confidence in the brand.

And clearly, we saw that in the last two weeks and hopefully, once the dust settles here, we'll see it again.

And then any comment on that immediate impact like the week after the Triumph, or do you not want to speak to that?

We clearly felt an impact on Carnival Cruise Lines, sure.

Right.

Any magnitude that you'd like to offer?

Not really.

Okay, thank you.

I don't even know if we've got that particular week in front of us.

But, it was --

It wasn't -- let me put it this way.

It wasn't anything like we've had in the past -- September 11 or other issues.

We had nothing like that.

We didn't go negative.

Plus, we didn't have lots of cancellations.

But we had a double-digit decline in bookings.

Somebody signaled us it was double-digit.

We had a double-digit decline in bookings.

That can go anywhere from 10% --

It wasn't huge and it didn't last very long.

The remarkable thing is the resiliency of this brand.

So that when -- it is amazing.

So, even with all of this negative media coverage, it still booked a lot of business, and it will continue to book a lot of business.

I think people understand the value of a Carnival vacation, the great vacations they have, and that these things occasionally will happen.

And so, as Micky said, our repeat passengers are still booking a lot of business.

So we're okay.

I mean it wasn't a dramatic -- if we told you the number, it would be a whole lot less than you think it is but we're not -- I don't have the number and probably wouldn't tell you if I had it.

It's not that dramatic.

Excellent.

Thank you.

And on the other brands just a marginal -- we just felt it on a very marginal basis, as is my guess the rest of the cruise industry did.

Just to give you a sense, the Triumph event affected 3000 passengers, unfortunately.

The Dream event, which was a couple of hours of outages -- outage -- it was really, I mean, on the Dream, everything has been operating fine.

We had one closed public room toilet that got a huge amount of publicity, but last night we brought in Jon Secada to do a concert for the passengers on the Dream.

So that was 3000 passengers, the Dream was 4000 passengers on a base of 4.4 million passengers, the Carnival Cruise Lines carries.

And they come back 98%, 99% very happy.

So that's what's going to drive the strength of the brand.

Even on the Dream, the reports we're getting back is a lot of people are just fine.

It's just they're on the ship.

They're in the port.

All services are working.

They're enjoying St.

Maarten and will fly back today, tomorrow and the next day.

It was a few hours of power outages in port on Wednesday evening, but by midnight, everything was back to normal and has been back to normal ever since.

James Hardiman, Longbow Research.

My first question -- last year, following the Concordia issue, your localized strategy seemed to be to try as much as possible to hold price and basically weather the storm on the occupancy side.

Now, whether or not that's exactly what happened, I think the rationale was solid with the hopes to isolate the pricing fallout to the one brand.

I was hoping you could maybe compare and contrast your strategy going forward this year, Concordia versus the Triumph and the subsequent incidents.

You know, pricing versus occupancy as well as sort of general marketing.

Well, when we made that statement based on the publicity and the situation in Italy -- and obviously that was a very tragic event -- it was the belief that we couldn't fill the Costa ships, particularly from Italy, at any price, and so there was no point in doing price promotion.

Here, as I said, with price stimulus that is not significantly different than last year, Carnival Cruise Lines' bookings last week for the first three days was up 25%.

So it's a totally different set of circumstances.

And let me just explain further.

We made that statement I think it was early March of last year.

During that period, Costa was doing consumer studies to understand how people felt about the brand and cruising.

Ultimately, I think it was right around the end of March where it appeared that sentiment was changing and Costa did then change their strategy, came up with a price promotion approach, and starting I think it was early April and throughout the rest of the year.

By the time we got to the fourth quarter, Costa had essentially filled their ships.

So, early on, we followed -- we held price, as Micky said, but later on we adapted to the environment and we filled the ships at lower prices.

Great.

And then second, somewhat related question, given your localized brand strategy, sort of big picture, how many of your customers do you think actually make the connection between the brand that they use and the umbrella Carnival brand?

Obviously, you did a great job with Concordia last year really isolating that fallout to Costa.

Obviously, the Carnival line of ships is much bigger for starters, but is it going to be dramatically more difficult this year, just given the brand associated with the various issues is also the overarching Company brand?

I don't think so.

I think the consumer -- from a consumer standpoint, I think that they look at each brand as a brand.

I don't think they connect the overall connection at the corporate level.

So, I'm sure there are some that do, but I think probably a very small percentage.

But we haven't done any studies on it, to be honest with you.

Honestly, anecdotally, when I ask -- when people tell me they had a wonderful time and I ask them which ship they were on or what company, half the time they don't know.

Excellent, thanks guys.

Assia Georgieva, Infinity Research.

My first question is whether you expect any impact to your new builds in terms of price or delivery date if you do need to do redundancies on those as well.

No.

Based on rule changes that occurred in 2010, all of this is already baked into the new builds.

Okay, great.

And my second question is, given how many moving parts there are to the European booking picture, EAA brands, ex Costa and with Costa, could you give us a sense as to the level of bookings for Q3, given obviously the key quarter for Europe this year versus the same time last year?

And this is with Costa, with everything.

Yes, I haven't -- we haven't broken it down by quarter.

I think that what I said is that the overall occupancies and pricing for the nine months is really very consistent with what we are seeing quarter by quarter, especially for the third and fourth quarters.

For the second quarter, of course occupancy has caught up significantly, but pricing is down a little bit in each of those quarters in Europe.

Okay, thank you Howard.

Jamie Rollo, Morgan Stanley.

The first question, it might be a hard one to answer because few of these get reported I guess, but in a normal year, how many ship incidents do you normally have across the Group please?

Let me -- I don't think that -- I don't think we know -- I don't think I know how to answer that question, but I will say this, that over the last, we've taken a look at ship incidents that have received some relative media attention let's say over the last 10 years for our group of companies versus all other ships, all other cruise lines in the world fleet, and the relative percentage of incidents for our cruise lines is almost the same.

It was right on point with the relative percentage of incidents of -- on other cruise lines.

So there really is no difference.

Unfortunately, for us, the last year or so or since the Concordia incidence had been a little bit higher, but if you go back beyond that, it was considerably lower.

And by the way, these are the same people that have been running the same ships all of these years.

The ships haven't changed.

So, it's just, sadly, we've just been hit by a run here that has been very unfortunate.

And hopefully, we'll get some reprieve from this going forward.

I don't know if I answered your question Jamie right on point, but I don't have the data.

Okay, no, I understand.

The other question was on the $0.05.

I didn't fully understand exactly what that was.

Was that your best estimate of the sort of revenue cost of the safety review, or does it include any lost revenue from more time in drydock?

I got the impression that number could go up a fair amount depending on the review.

Is that correct?

Well, it's a preliminary number, and it tries to cover I would say lost profit if we have to move a ship into drydock early as well as any R&M -- additional R&M expense associated with the drydock.

It's a very preliminary number.

It could move up or down.

And if it's materially different, we would let you guys know, but at this point it's our best guess.

And just as an ancillary to that, if I may, is there were a figure you could possibly give us for what you spend on sort of safety spend or safety checks, whether it's drydocks, repairs, maintenance?

What's the annual sort of budget for that please?

I don't have all that detail with me but, you know, there's millions and millions of dollars spent on those types of things as we go through -- whether it be capital, R&M,, work done in drydock.

And part of our payroll is associated with that.

There is audits of the ships, routine maintenance, etc.

all associated with safety.

Simulators that we built and man in Holland and in Germany, the trained crew on deck and engine, that is in our numbers as well.

So, we don't isolate (multiple speakers)

We don't isolate the number actually.

(multiple speakers) you're asking that question.

Yes, no, I understand.

Thank you very much.

James Hollins, Investec.

Two questions from me.

The first is on the strategy.

I've heard a bit of sort of industry chatter around Asia and I was just looking for an update that you could give on particularly for out of your Singapore office, the sort of demand you're seeing out of Asia, whether I should be expecting sort of a more aggressive move of itineraries of ships over to that market in the medium term or whether I should be waiting longer for that to happen.

The second one was on commission and transport costs.

Those costs per ALBD I have down at about 11% per ALBD in the quarter.

I think they've been down 10% or 11% in Q3, Q4 last year as well.

Is there something particular going on there?

Is this a level that can continue, given particularly its size and your cost structure?

Thanks very much

James, this is Howard.

Let me take the Asia strategy discussion.

We have added a -- Costa has added a second ship this spring to increase -- double the size of their ships in China and Southeast Asia for the coming year, so that seems to be going quite well.

The ships are profitable.

The business is good.

The pricing is good and we are very encouraged.

In addition, Princess has announced additional capacity to go into the Japanese market.

They have one ship built that's starting to sail I think in late April in Japan and then for I think a 90-day period.

That has done very well.

So, they're adding -- they've announced the addition of a second ship to Japan the following year.

And we continue to work on the Asia strategy, and it's likely that you'll see some continued increase in capacity in Asia for us in years beyond that.

So, we're very encouraged by what we see.

We think it is -- it seems to have really started to take real roots.

The message that cruising is a good vacation alternative for the Chinese and other Asians is coming across.

We spend a lot of time in the Asian markets and talking at different conferences and so on.

We are getting a lot of support from all of Asian governments.

They've all been supportive of what's coming in and not just us, our competitors as well.

So we think it's a very viable end market for us in the future.

I'll let David talk about the commission and transportation line.

Yes.

The line you're looking at in the P&L, keep in mind it's not only commission but also transportation which is primarily our air costs associated with our air-sea guests as well as a few other things.

We have continued to see a tick-down in our air-sea mix.

And as a result of that, there is less air costs, less guests are buying air from us overall.

That affects the number.

And the other thing that has affected the number, particularly in the last three quarters that you mentioned, has to do with the change that we had announced in the UK commission structure.

So, those were the -- for first quarter 2013, those were the two drivers that brought that number down.

Okay.

And can you give sort of any guidance on what it might be down?

Obviously, it depends on what level of air-sea passengers you have, what level it might be down.

I assume down for full year 2013 as a whole per ALBD.

Yes, you know, we don't forecast that because the way we look at it is we forecast on a net basis, so the yield guidance we gave you is the revenue net of the transportation and commission costs.

And so we have looked at it at that level.

Okay.

I was just trying to get to sort of how aggressively sort of negative you been on, on gross yield, given that is coming down.

But it sounds like you won't be giving me that.

Yes.

It's baked into the yields, so it really doesn't matter.

It's pretty consistent.

There aren't any great movements between gross and net yields is the way we describe them.

Okay, thanks.

Thank you.

Mr. Frank, there are no further questions at this time.

I will now turn the call back to you.

Okay, well, I think we can conclude the call right now.

And I think if there are any following questions, Beth Roberts is around to handle them this afternoon.

And thank you all for listening in.

Apologies again for the short notice.

We'll try to give you more notice for the next call.

Thanks everybody and have a good day.

Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude the conference call for today.

We thank you for your participation and ask that you please disconnect your lines.

Have a great day.