Welcome to the Royal Caribbean blog podcast, your weekly look into the world of Royal Caribbean cruising.

I'm your host, Matt Hodgeberg, and this is episode number 487.

Last week, Royal Caribbean had its earnings call with investors, and this week I wanted to dive into some of the most interesting tidbits about this and what it really means for us as cruisers going here into 2023.

Here we go.

Every quarter, Royal Caribbean holds an earnings call with Wall Street analysts to go over

their quarterly results. And most of the goal of this call and most of the topics discussed

are primarily financial base, you know, money in,

revenue, losses, profits, gross revenue, other things that are just pure numbers. And for cruise

guests and people that are fans of cruise lines, it really doesn't mean a whole lot or has any

real impact, certainly. It's quite frankly very boring. But interwoven between

all the discussions about numbers is some potentially interesting information for cruisers because

at the end of the day, what Royal Caribbean does in terms of its profitability also has a direct

impact on the guest experience. They are trying to balance, of course, delivering a quality product to guests while still making money at the same time.

Right? There's always a balance. If they try to squeeze every last dollar out of everything,

they risk perhaps a subpar product. At the same time, if they offer, you know, just the best

of the best of the best, well, that may come at the cost, of course, the extra expenses and whatnot,

thus not making you very profitable. Now, that's a very basic overview. But in the real scheme of

these calls, we oftentimes get a lot of interesting information, anecdotes, and tidbits of information.

And I thought this week, this would be a really good opportunity to share with all

of you some of my insights and things that I picked up on during the earnings call and talk about

what these mean and potential trends, really, for a cruise in 2023. Off the bat, let's talk about

purely the numbers, because there is a number that's really interesting here, and that is

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