Josh Weinstein
Carnival Corp. has a new CEO, with Josh Weinstein taking the role on August 1, replacing Arnold Donald, who had held the post since 2013. Weinstein took over after serving as the company’s COO, following stints as president of Carnival UK and as treasurer and corporate attorney. 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.
Question: You’ve spent much of your career out of the spotlight. Why do you want to be the CEO of Carnival Corp.?
A: I don’t really think of him as a frontman. I really see this as an 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 to take people away from the everyday and give them a much needed break.
Question: What is your long term vision?
A: I want each of our nine brands to own 100% of their space in the vacation market they choose to be in. … Now, there are other components to the way I think about the future and the corporation. We will rebuild our financial fortress. We entered the pandemic with $12 billion in debt and an A-minus credit rating, and like the rest of the cruise line and many other companies, we’ve come out of that phase where we have a different balance sheet. We have much more debt. We need to regenerate money in order to be able to pay off that debt and get the financial strength, which I know we can do. It’s a combination of generating that income, looking at our business, spending the money like it’s our own money, investing where it’s needed, where we’re going to make a difference, and not spending the money when we don’t need it so we get the money and pay off the debt and, over time, get a roadmap to regain that investment-grade credit rating.
Question: How do you see your relationship with agents evolving?
A: Part of my job as CEO of Carnival Corp. is to understand the travel agent partners as one of our stakeholders and ensure that I understand what they see as what is going well, what is not going well and where there are opportunities for Carnival Corp. and trade for both to do better collectively. So that’s part of my role, which wasn’t really part of my role as chief operating officer.
Question: How Carnival Corp. serves retirement of CDC regulations under the Cruise Ship Covid-19 Program?
Twenty years after starting at Carnival Corp., he now oversees its nine brands, more than 100,000 employees and its response to industry challenges.
Continue reading
A: The safety and health and well-being of people is our business; respectfully, we do not need the CDC program to guide us from this perspective. What we need is the freedom and flexibility to lead ourselves responsibly. Now we have complete freedom to do so and we do not take it lightly. We have met the challenges, and so we take it seriously and will continue to do so now.
We seem to be moving to a place where it’s more like taking personal responsibility for living with Covid. I feel strongly that we will once again expand our demand base for people who could not travel with us due to some of our protocols or simply watched [our regulations] like, “Well, that’s a hassle, and you have to do it if you go on a cruise, but you don’t have to do it 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 lines have. We’ve done a lot of great things despite being put on an uneven playing field, so that gives me a lot of confidence as we look forward.
Question: There was talk earlier this year that a party was interested in buying Seabourn. What happened there?
A: I won’t talk about any particular rumor, but I get asked this question. We will look at every opportunity that comes our way. This is our job and this is my job. We would have done this in 2007, we would have done it in 2010, 14, 17, 20 and now. So that doesn’t change.
