Carnival CFO says he kept promise to repay pandemic debt

Carnival merges dual-listed structure into single company

Carnival Corp. Chief Financial Officer David Bernstein said the cruise operator has repaid its pandemic-era debt, completing a commitment he made to investors in the spring of 2020.

Nearly five years after Carnival’s first ship returned to sea, Bernstein said he and other company insiders have delivered: debt is down $10 billion to roughly $26 billion since 2022, Carnival has regained investment-grade status, and cash is again flowing to shareholders through dividends and buybacks.

“I finally feel like I have completed the promise I made to all those hundreds of investors that I talked to in the spring of 2020,” Bernstein told The Wall Street Journal’s CFO Journal in an interview published this month. Having kept his word, he said he plans to stay at the company.

The Covid-19 pandemic grounded the cruise industry, leaving ships empty after high-profile outbreaks and a more than yearlong U.S. hiatus. Cruise giants watched revenues collapse as debt loads ballooned.

On costs, Bernstein said AI is allowing Carnival to be more productive, and that when attrition occurs he does not always replace departing workers. “Do I really need to replace that person?” he said, adding that the company has been saving money that way for at least a year. He also cited sourcing savings — where and from whom the company buys, and how many of its operating companies source a particular item — and said he assembled a small group of finance staff to control cloud spending by tagging underutilized items.

Bernstein declined to set a specific external cost-savings target, citing uncertainty about inflation and the broader economy. “We’re hoping it’s below inflation,” he said. “We should be able to do better than just say, inflation is 3%, and costs go up 3%.”

In early May, Carnival Corp. and Carnival PLC moved from a dual-listed company structure to a unified company. Bernstein said the dual-listed structure dated to 2003, and the balance between the two entities shifted over time — PLC shares, which once represented over 30% of market cap, came to represent around 10% in 2026. The change eliminates a few million dollars a year in administrative costs from managing two regulatory environments, he said, and operationally changed nothing outside roughly 15 to 20 people in corporate.

Asked about capital-investment priorities, Bernstein said reinvesting cash into the business is always the company’s number one priority, including 10 ships on order, more potential orders, and investment in exclusive destinations such as private islands. He said Carnival will grow the dividend over time as earnings per share grows and return the remainder to shareholders through opportunistic stock buybacks.