Arnold W. Donald
President & Chief Executive Officer at Carnival Co. &
Good morning, and welcome to our business update conference call. I'm Arnold Donald, President and CEO of Carnival Corporation & plc. Today, I'm joined telephonically by our Chairman, Micky Arison; our Chief Financial Officer, David Bernstein; and Beth Roberts, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations. We'd like to thank you all for joining us this morning.
Now before I begin, please note that some of our remarks on this call will be forward-looking. Therefore, I must refer you to the cautionary statement in today's press release. Prior to getting into the details of the update, I just first want to say my heart goes out to all those affected by the invasion of Ukraine. I know thousands of members of our Carnival family are directly impacted and have loved ones in the area.
We, along with the rest of the world, are praying for a peaceful resolution. Now concerning our business. We're well on our way back to full cruise operations, with three quarters of our capacity having resumed guest operations and a plan to return the balance of the fleet for the summer season. And while the conversation around COVID-19 is greatly reduced, we still have to and are successfully actively managing.
Our enhanced protocols have helped us become among the safest farms of socializing and travel with far lower incident rates than on land. In fact, we have carried more than two million since resuming gas operations. Our guests are enjoying great vacations, and we are enjoying historically high guest satisfaction scores. Of course, we have not lost sight of our highest responsibility, and therefore, our top priority, which is always compliance, environmental protection and the health, safety and well-being of everyone, our guests, the people and the communities we touch and serve, and of course, our Carnival family, our team members shipboard, and shoreside.
I'd like to start today by sincerely thanking our Carnival team members for their significant contributions which collectively have gotten us to where we are today despite a multitude of challenges. Through their collective efforts, so far, we successfully returned 64 ships to guest operations; enabled over 70,000 crew members to return to work, happy, healthy, and vaccinated through our team's considerable efforts to secure and distribute vaccines; reopened our eight owned and operated private destinations and port facilities, which about half of our guests have experienced since resuming operations, Princess Cay, Half Moon Cay, Grand Turk, Mahogany Bay, Amber Cove, Cozumel, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, and Barcelona; and most importantly, delivered 2.2 million joyful vacations and counting. At the same time, we also managed down operating costs, reducing our monthly adjusted EBITDA losses by 40% since mid-2020; completed a continuous stream of capital raising, exceeding $29 billion; refinanced more than $9 billion of debt, improving interest rates; amended over 100 different lender agreements; and successfully addressed our maturity tower out through 2024. All of which culminated in a consistent liquidity position exceeding $7 billion, an integral part of reinforcing stakeholder confidence.
At our scale, the sheer volume of these accomplishments is no small feat. Yet these challenging operational deliverables were achieved while encountering strong headwinds like: delta; omicron; complex, constraining, and constantly changing regulations and protocols; and more recently, the very troubling invasion of Ukraine. All of which undermine consumer confidence and generate greater friction on cross-border travel, labor, supply chain, itinerary planning, and more. Now concerning the invasion of Ukraine.
For the 4.6% of our capacity that was expected to call on Russian ports in the remainder of the year, we have decided to totally withdraw from Russia and have found attractive alternatives. That said, St. Petersburg was a marquee port for us. And while there have been times where we were unable to offer certain [Indecipherable] itineraries, in this instance, the close end nature of the deployment change does lead to some regional disruption in recent booking patterns.
Now while the invasion has added some volatility to our business and does impact consumer confidence, with 50 years under our belt, we have successfully managed through a plethora of headwinds like: spikes in fuel prices, the Gulf War, Arab Spring, September 11, Ebola, Zika, SARS, MERS and more. And once again, the mobility of ships continues to be an asset. Time and time again, we have seen guests travel through challenges. In fact, Carnival Cruise Line turned 50 this month and recently enjoyed its three best weeks of bookings since resuming operations.
As we previously disclosed, we had experienced an impact on booking patterns more broadly at the start of our fiscal year due to the omicron variant. Despite omicron, guests carried grew by nearly 20% in the first quarter. Of course, albeit less than we would have otherwise achieved without the elevated cancellations which occurred in part due to a higher incidence of pretravel positive COVID test results as well as the difficulties that many prospective guests experienced obtaining timely tests. Moreover, there was just an overall impact omicron had on our society over the course of our first quarter.
However, we did maintain price as we said we would. We fully expect an extended wave season. In fact, we're already achieving occupancies in the month of March that are nearing 70% with more than 40 sailings exceeding 100% occupancy, a testament to the underlying demand for crews and closer in nature of booking patterns. Concerning recent fuel prices.
It's certainly not the first time we've seen a dramatic spike in fuel prices. Helping to address that, we aggressively manage our consumption. And we are stepping up our efforts to further reduce consumption. Now historically, we have not used fuel derivatives.
And while there is an optics benefit of smoothing earnings, over time, prices have gone up and they've also come down. But there is an economic cost to derivatives. Over the past few years, we're very glad not to have speculated with few derivatives because on a further drain on cash. With our proactive efforts to reduce our footprint since 2007, we have reduced our unit fuel consumption nearly 30% and carbon intensity nearly 25% through 2019.
And thanks to accelerated efforts across the board, upon reaching full fleet operations, we anticipate that we will achieve a further 10% reduction in unit fuel consumption and 9% reduction in carbon intensity as compared to 2019. In fact, we've been working hard to resume operations not only a strong operating company but a more sustainable, better all-around company. We made further strides toward those efforts again this quarter. During the quarter, we enhanced our fleet optimization efforts, delivering three new ships: Costa Toscana, AIDAcosma, and Discovery Princess, bringing the total to nine larger, more efficient ships delivered since 2019.
Moreover, we've announced the removal of an additional three smaller, less efficient ships, bringing the total to 22 ships to be removed from the fleet also since 2019. The accelerated removal of these less efficient ships has lowered capacity growth to 2.2% compound annually from the previous 4.5% through 2025, which should enable us to capitalize on pent-up demand on intentionally constrained capacity. The fleet optimization effort will also foster higher revenues through a seven percentage point increase in premium-priced balcony cabins and an even better platform for onboard revenue opportunities as well as generating a 5% reduction in ship level unit costs, excluding fuel, going forward, enabling us to deliver more revenue to the bottom line. Upon returning to full operations, nearly a quarter of our capacity will consist of newly delivered ships, expediting our return to profitability and improving our return on invested capital.
Again, we have long since recognize the importance of reducing our carbon footprint having peaked our absolute carbon emissions more than a decade ago. And we are continuing to innovate to effect change. AIDAprima will become our first ship to pilot battery power, enabling her to optimize the efficiency of the engines while at sea, reducing emissions. We also signed groundbreaking agreements through our subsidiary, Ecospray, to partner in the production of green bio-LNG generated from waste sources.
In addition, we continue to invest to drive energy efficiency, rolling out our fourth in a series of 23 ships with innovative air lubrication system, which reduces drag on the haul and generates nearly 5% reduction in carbon emissions. We've also taken strides to reduce our impact on climate change and mitigate climate risk in our business. We are working toward full adoption of the recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, that's TCFD, and have begun by reinforcing our strong governance framework with my assuming the role of Chief Climate Officer, and with the formation of our Strategic Risk Evaluation Committee to further support climate-related strategic decision-making and risk management processes. Having broadened our commitments to ESG with the introduction of our 2030 sustainability goals and our 2050 aspirations, we are tracking ahead on both our important food waste and single-use plastic reduction efforts.
And we are nearing completion on the rollout of more than 600 food waste biodigesters across our fleet, the most advanced technology of its kind. We believe we have clearly maximized our return to service, and we have positioned our company well to withstand volatility on our path to profitability. Throughout the pause, we have been proactively managing to resume operations as an even stronger and more efficient operating company to maximize cash generation and to deliver double-digit return on invested capital over time. Again, our cash flow will be the primary driver to return to investment-grade credit over time, creating greater shareholder value.
There have been multiple demonstrations of the resilience of the human spirit and the resilience of our business. It is heartening that our company can be a part of bringing our guests much needed social enjoyment with family and with friends, along with the excitement of experiencing new destinations and cultures, all dearly missed throughout the pandemic. I referenced Carnival Cruise Line celebrating 50 years. 50 years, frankly, seems such a short time ago that Tad Arison started Carnival Cruise Line, and along with Micky, built the modern day cruise industry, bringing joy from millions of on millions of guests and creating hundreds of thousands of jobs with all that means and creating better quality of life around the world.
Of course, it cannot have been done without the overwhelming support from everyone. So once again, thank you to our valued guests. Thank you to our travel agent partners. Thank you to our home port and destination communities.
Thank you to our suppliers and other many stakeholders. And of course, thank you to our shareholders, bondholders, banks, and the export credit agencies for your continued confidence in us and for your ongoing support. And again, I would like to thank our team members for their dedication, their commitment and their outstanding execution. We are excited to welcome everyone back on board.
With that, I'll turn the call over to David.
