Name: How Carnival Cruise Line's CEO Changed the Company’s Image
Uploaded: 2016-04-12
Duration: 4 min 13 s
Description: After a series of nightmare occurrences

Arnold, when people hear the name Carnival Cruises, they think back to a lot of highly publicized negative incidents that involved some passenger deaths, maybe a fire, some unsanitary conditions. And then you came in and you changed things up. What do you think was the most important thing that you did to change Carnival's reputation and image? We spent a lot of time with the media exposing them to cruise. Making certain that they understood All the information we had. And were being transparent. We relied on the industry association as well. And we just built a relationship with the media so things were put in proper perspective. And then we worked on what we always worked on which is exceeding guest expectations. And as we do that then the guests carry the day for us. Mm- hm I mean since you've come in as CEO it's almost three years now you've pulled off a remarkable turn around whether you look at earning or revenues or cash levels. Everything is up, Carnival stock is up more than 50 %. Since you came in again. I mean what was the most critical thing you did to get those kind of results? The most critical thing was simply to unleash the latent potential the people that were there. The second thing I did was I tapped into our guests and our stake holders. So listen, listen, listen. Listen first to the guest, they'll tell you what they want. Listen to the employees, they'll tell you how to deliver the guest what they want. And then listen to your leadership, they'll tell you what's gonna have them be motivated to deliver. And you're gonna be listening to your shareholders this week. Yes. You'll have a meeting here in New York. What are you gonna be telling them about the state of a Of Carnival right now? We have a very strong performance. We grew 40 %, 15 over 14, 25 % 14 over 13 and our guidance is to grow another 20 % this year at the mid point of our guidance so... That we're having a very strong performance and it's on the basis of our people. Growing 20 % this year in earnings. I mean that's amazing. What's driving that growth? Where's it coming from? The growth is coming from a combination of yield and improvement. So ticket pricing. Onboard spending and cost containment, managing our costs well. And it's coming from various markets around the world because we're in 700 ports around the world. And let's talk about ticket prices. I'm amazed that you are raising ticket prices. You'd think in this environment, a lot of the travellers are holding back from taking a cruise because of worries about Geopolitical terror and the Zika virus. You're raising prices? Yeah. Every year, there's something. So this year it's Zika, last year it was MERS. The year before, it was Ebola. Every year, there's something, and every year there's, you know, terrorist activity or some disruption in geopolitical issues and macroeconomic malaise. That happens every year. Our job is to deliver anyway. And so in effect we were able to raise prices because we are already such a great vacation value relative to land base vacations. So we have lots of room to raise and still be of a better value. You have ships that travel all around the world. How are you reassuring people that it's safe and that you've got a handle On these geopolitical risks. People wanna travel. They wanna experience new things. Yes, these situations occur and they may have a disruption in one part of the world or another, but the reality is that in the end people really want to experience the world. And that's what we do. We help them experience the world and each other. Why is it that your business is growing, double digits, at a time when so many other American companies are struggling in this slow- growth economy? I think part of it for the cruise industry is we're so under- penetrated. If you add up all All the cabins in the world, they add up to less than 2 % of the hotel rooms in the world. And they say we are already such a great value relative to the equivalent land base vacation. That we have room to move and it's still a good deal. How does the U. S.. economy look to you right now? Well, the U. S. economy is choppy, but overall solid compared to all the economies around the world. We actually don't see a tight correlation. Between the economy and our results. We do in consumer confidence in our results, see more of a correlation. But in terms of correlation between economies, because again we're under penetrated, we're a great value so even in times of recession in different places around the world including the US, we can still grow. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]