Carnival Corporation brands carried some 3.5 million new to cruise guests in 2023, according to CEO Josh Weinstein, speaking on the company’s year-end and fourth quarter earnings call.

“In 2023, we captured over 3.5 million new to cruise guests and remain well-positioned to continue to take share from land-based alternatives,” he said.

“In other words, we are gaining momentum in our ability to close the unwarranted value gap to land-based alternatives. And to aid in that effort, we can further chance the fact that while many land-based alternatives have pulled back on service levels. We still deliver incredible service to our guests, thanks to our amazing crew.”

Weinstein said that during the year, web traffic was up 35 percent across the company’s nine brands.

“Our paid search was up roughly 50 percent and our natural search was up almost 75 percent, all many, many multiples of our 5 percent capacity growth. In the fourth quarter, we carried more new to cruise, have more new-to-brand guests than we did in the fourth quarter of 2019,” Weinstein said.

“Now clearly a lot of new-to-cruise will over index on the shorter cruises because they’re trying it out for the first time and that lends itself to maybe also a younger crowd which is more comfortable just playing around on the net and doing things direct,” he continued. “I expect this to continue, our trade partners are absolutely critical in driving new-to-cruise to us. And we’ve relied on them for decades to do that. And we will rely on them for decades more and they have done a great job of really catching up to where we’ve been in the curve and year-over-year they’re showing great strength as well.”