As cruise lines navigate back to normal, they’re finding a surprising new wave of customers: millennial and Gen Z travelers. These younger passengers have their own reasons for thinking the boating life is cool. We sent a reporter on a cruise to Cozumel to discover what got them on board.
After making big gains of more than 35% in November following positive Covid vaccine news and developments, the cruise stocks have cooled off over the past month. In a research note Friday, Woronka attributed that turnaround “to multiple reasons, with perhaps the most important being a bit less optimism of late about the timing of a return to sailings out of U.S. ports.”
“It’s unlikely, in our view, that entire fleets will be back in the water much before year end,” he wrote. “The critical question is, at what point can enough capacity return such that current (elevated) cash burn levels can be reduced to more manageable levels that might not necessitate further capital raises?”
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The CEO said Carnival has yet to decide whether to require that passengers be vaccinated. Daniel Slim/AFP via Getty Images Text size
Cruise operator
Carnival on Monday reported a fiscal fourth-quarter net loss of $2.2 billion, but its chief financial officer said that it has enough liquidity to get through 2021 “even in a zero-revenue environment.”
Like its other U.S.-based peers, Carnival (ticker: CCL) has for the most part been shut down since mid-March of last year due to the pandemic, though it has had limited sailings in Europe recently.
Carnival CEO Arnold Donald said during a conference call with analysts Monday that he hopes to have the company’s entire fleet operating by the end of the year. But that remains to be seen given the recent spike in Covid-19 cases, the complexity of the conditional sail order issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last October, and the slower-than-e