Carnival Corporation is seeing some small shifts around its European booking activity in the weeks since Middle East situation escalated, but CEO Josh Weinstein played down any impact, speaking on the company’s first quarter earnings call.
On cruise cancellations, Weinstein was unequivocal: “We’re really not seeing anything significant to talk about with respect to cancellation trends. Our onboard spending has been consistently strong as we got out of Q1 and headed into Q2.”
The booking softness, he said, is not uniform. Different European deployments are behaving differently.
“To the extent that we’re talking about sailings that are Eastern Mediterranean, that’s got a different profile than Western Mediterranean, that’s got a different profile from Northern Europe, and then obviously Caribbean, Alaska, Australia,” he said. “Northern Europe is going quite well.”
Weinstein said the overall European booking pace has slipped, but only modestly.
“There is absolutely not the pace that we would have expected over the last few weeks versus a world where this wasn’t happening in the backdrop, but not to an extent that there’s much to talk about. Just an extent that things have shifted a little bit here and there.”
He added: “I have no idea how it’s going to play out. Cards on the table, I don’t know.”
“One of the strategies that we had going into wave was pull forward the occupancy, pull forward the bookings; and we did just that. So we entered into this period with a nice amount of headroom, which we’ve maintained overall … We are very well booked in Europe to begin with.
“I’m sure there’s going to be reverberations we don’t know about yet, but the teams are managing to the curve and being reactive, because the world is pretty reactive right now.”