Q&A with Carnival Corp. CEO Josh Weinstein: Travel Weekly
Carnival Corp. has a new CEO, with Josh Weinstein assuming the role on Aug. 1, replacingArnold Donald, who had held the position since 2013. Weinstein stepped in after serving as COO of the company, following stints as president of Carnival UK and as treasurer and an attorney for the corporation. He spoke with cruise editor Andrea Zelinski about his vision for Carnival Corp. and how he plans to lead the company back to financial health.
Q: You’ve spent a lot of your career outside the limelight. Why do you want to be the frontman for Carnival Corp.?
A: I don’t really think of it as being the frontman. I really look at this as the opportunity to lead a pretty phenomenal organization and an amazing group of people. We have a company whose mission is to make people happy and take people away from the everyday and give them a much-needed vacation.
Q: What is your long-term vision?
A: I want each of our nine brands to 100% own their space in the vacation market in which they choose to establish themselves. … Now, there are other components to how I think about the future and the corporation. We will rebuild our financial fortress. We entered the pandemic with $12 billion of debt and an A-minus credit rating, and like the rest of cruise and so many other companies, we’ve been exiting this phase where we have a different balance sheet. We have a lot more debt. We’ve got to regenerate cash to be able to pay down that debt and get the financial strength back, which I know we can do. It’s a combination of generating those revenues, watching our business, spending money like it’s our own money, investing where we need to, where we’ll make differences, and not spending the money when we don’t have to so we can take the money and pay down debt and, over time, get a roadmap to get back that investment-grade credit rating.
Q: How do you see your relationship with agents evolving?
A: Part of my job in being the CEO of Carnival Corp. is understanding the travel agent partners as one of our stakeholders and ensuring I understand what they view as what’s going well, what’s not going well and where there are opportunities for Carnival Corp. and the trade to both do better collectively. So that is part of my role, which was not really part of my chief operations officer role.
Q: How does the CDC’s retirement of regulations under the Covid-19 Program for Cruise Ships serve Carnival Corp.?
Twenty years after his start at Carnival Corp., he now oversees its nine brands, more than 100,000 employees and its response to industry challenges.
A: Safety and the health and well-being of people is our business; respectfully, we don’t need the CDC program to guide us from that perspective. What we do need is the freedom and flexibility to run ourselves responsibly. We now have complete freedom to do that, and we don’t take that lightly. We have risen to the challenges, and so we take it seriously and we’ll continue to do that now.
We seem to be moving into a place where it more closely resembles just taking personal responsibility of living with Covid. I do feel strongly that we will broaden our base of demand once again for people who couldn’t travel with us because of some of our protocols or just looked at [our regulations] as, “Well, this is a hassle, and you have to do this if you go on a cruise, but you don’t have to do that if you want to make a different vacation choice.” We are finally able to start leveling that playing field. We’ve done a lot of great things, and other cruise companies have. We’ve done a lot of great things despite the fact that we’ve been put on an uneven playing field, so that gives me a lot of confidence as we look forward.
Q: There was talk earlier this year that a party was interested in buying Seabourn. What happened there?
A: I won’t speak to any particular rumors, but I do get asked that question. We will look at any opportunity that comes our way. That’s our job, and that’s my job. We would have done that in 2007, would have done that in 2010, ’14, ’17, ’20 and now. So that doesn’t change.
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