Arnold Donald
Management
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our second quarter 2017 earnings conference call. I am Arnold Donald, President and CEO of Carnival Corporation & plc. Thank you all for joining us this morning. Today, I'm joined by our Chairman, Micky Arison; David Bernstein, our Chief Financial Officer; and Beth Roberts, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations. Before I begin, please note that some of our remarks on this call will be forward looking. Therefore, I must refer you to the cautionary statement in today's press release. We achieved record second quarter adjusted earnings of $0.52 per share. That's on top of last year's previous record-setting second quarter, and we exceeded the midpoint of our guidance by $0.07. Our second quarter results, combined with our strong booked position, enabled us to again increase the midpoint of our previous full year guidance range and raise our full-year earnings expectations to a range between $3.60 and $3.70. Year-over-year, for the second quarter, despite a $0.12 drag from fuel and currency both moving against us, strong operational improvement contributed $0.13 per share to the bottom line, which when combined with $0.02 of accretion from our share repurchase program, enabled us to exceed the prior year second quarter and the high end of our March guidance range. The efforts of our more than 120,000 employees around the world who deliver exceptional guest experiences every day, combined with the support of our valued travel agent partners, propelled our strong financial performance. Constant currency revenue yield growth this quarter exceeded 5%, on top of the 3.6% improvement achieved in the second quarter last year. Our consistently strong revenue improvement continues to be driven by increasing demand in excess of our measured capacity growth through our ongoing guest experience, marketing and public relations efforts. And as previously indicated, we…