Josh Weinstein
Management
Good morning. This is Josh Weinstein. Welcome to our First Quarter 2023 Business Update Conference Call. I'm joined today by our Chair, Micky Arison; our Chief Financial Officer, David Bernstein; and our Senior Vice President of Investor Relations, Beth Roberts. 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. Consistent with our last business update, we remain on an upward trajectory as we further closed the gap to 2019. We are still experiencing a record wave season, which started early, gained strength and has extended later into the year. We expect these favorable trends to continue based on the traction we're making to our ongoing effort to drive demand globally. In the first quarter, we outperformed our guidance on all measures: Revenue, costs, adjusted EBITDA and earnings, while overcoming over $30 million in headwinds from fuel price and currency since our prior guidance. Thanks to the dedicated efforts of our 160,000 amazing team members around the world. We had sequential improvement in our occupancy gap to 2019 from 19 points in Q4 to 13 points in Q1 on increasing capacity, which is now above 2019 levels. We anticipate being just 7 points or less away from 2019 occupancies in the second quarter, well on our way to historical occupancies this summer. Equally important, we also drove ticket prices higher and continue to throttle back on our opaque channel while also maintaining outsized onboard revenue growth where we have not lost sight on the cost side of the business. We are working hard to mitigate four years of inflation while still reinvesting in advertising and sales support to build future demand. We did update our cost guidance primarily to reflect decisions…