Morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today at the New York Stock Exchange at this beautiful venue. We're really excited to kick off our 2024 Investor Day. I'm joined today by a few members of our management team who will be presenting, including Harry Sommer, President and CEO of Norwegian Cruise Line; David Herrera, President of Norwegian Cruise Line; Patrik Dahlgren, Executive Vice President of Vessel Operations; and Mark Kempa, Executive Vice President and CFO. As a reminder, this presentation is being simultaneously webcast on the company's investor relations website at www.nclh.ltd.com/investors. This webcast will also be available for replay for 30 days following today's event. Before we begin, I would like to cover a few items. This presentation includes forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from such statements. These statements should be considered in conjunction with the cautionary statement contained in our presentation. Our comments may also reference non-GAAP financial measures, a reconciliation of to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measure, and other associated disclosures are contained in our earnings release and presentation. With that, I'll turn the floor over to Harry.
Thank you. Thank you, Sarah, and I want to thank all of you for... Well, it has a mind of its own. Sarah, I think we're having some technical difficulties this morning. I'm going to, like, sing and dance here for a moment while they fix the video feed. Are you guys at least enjoying your breakfast so far this morning? Let's see if I can ad-lib for five minutes. It really is a beautiful room. I think this is our third time here that we're going to be doing the closing bell thing here later today, so that's always a lovely celebration. And now they fixed the problem, so we can start again. So, I want to thank all of you for, for joining us this morning for, for my first Investor Day, and I think the first Investor Day we've had as a company since, I believe, 2018. I'm really excited to be here with my entire executive leadership team, half sitting at that table and the other half sitting at that table, to discuss the future of NCLH, what we're calling Charting the Course, our strategy and financial targets for the next three years. It's been about a year since I was appointed CEO of this wonderful company, and I've really taken this opportunity to study the business.
I've met with partners, the investment community, team members, crew, and most importantly, guests, and I've had a chance to visit every ship throughout our fleet, or at least every ship class throughout our fleet, and actually got to experience the product. You know, some highlights: going on a racetrack with my family on the brand-new Norwegian Viva in Lisbon, sorry, the Norwegian Viva in Lisbon, having a steak in the Polo Grill on Oceania Vista, overlooking the castles in Malta, and experiencing the most beautiful, most expensive suite at sea on the Regent Seven Seas Grandeur during her christening cruise in Miami a few months ago. I've seen firsthand what our guests love about our product and the experiences that we deliver.
Past that, I spent the last year working with our executive leadership team on doing a deep dive in how we do business. We've worked on transforming the culture with a rigor and focus that we haven't seen as a company heretofore. We've prioritized what's important, and we developed a vision and strategy for the future. Today, you'll hear from a number of presenters that are all going to focus on a consistent message and that vision for the future, a balance between two primary dynamics. One is providing guests with experiences they value and are willing to pay, to pay for, what we refer to as the return on experience, or ROX, and delivering outstanding financial results, which we refer to as ROI. It's that balance that's going to propel this company forward. So let's get started. I begin with what makes NCLH a compelling investment opportunity.
It starts with the industry, with an excellent reputation, great demographics, strong demand, and a very limited supply growth. Within this industry, our three brands have a unique and strong position. Lastly, we have this balance between ROX and ROI, which I described, and David and Patrick are going to cover in much more detail on both the revenue and cost side. Simply put, our goal is to unlock shareholder value, which Mark will review later this morning in our Charting the Course 2026 targets. You guys all probably saw the press release this morning that we issued at 8:45 A.M., so none of this will be new to you. Well, at least it's, like, 20 minutes old, but here are our targets for 2026.
It starts with a keen focus on revenue growth and cost control, which will allow us to return to historical EBITDA margins as a company. We're very proud of being able to get to that 39%. That growth, with measured capacity growth, will lead to outsized EPS growth of $2.45 by 2026, a 30% CAGR over our newly published 2024 guidance. That, coupled with strong cash flow and disciplined capital allocation, which we'll use to strengthen the balance sheet, will decrease our leverage to 4.5x, considerably better than it is today, which will jointly allow us to target a return on invested capital, an ROIC, of 12%, a record for the company.
Of course, all of this is underpinned by being good stewards to the environment, and we're reaffirming our goal to have a 10% reduction in greenhouse gas intensity by 2026. The takeaway of this is every metric here is well ahead of where we are today, and well ahead of consensus for 2026, and we believe it puts us on a solid footing for a bright future and enhanced returns. Can't wait to see the first reports. You guys are already typing? Let's level set where it is that we are today. We're proud to have a history of 57 years of innovation. Of course, you know, we're the first cruise line. We invented modern cruising from the Caribbean back in 1966. We have an industry-leading portfolio of three complementary brands, offering a full range of product.
We plan to generate about $9 billion in revenue this year, carrying close to 3 million guests on our 32-ship fleet, 13 ships on order, which assures us growth through 2036. The core of, of course, of who we are is our 41,000 team members, who work day in and day out to deliver an exceptional product and exceptional financial results. We're led by a team of 10 executive leadership team members. As I mentioned before, they're all sitting here today. We'll be available to talk to you guys over lunch at the end of this presentation. Seven of us are new to our role, but collectively, we have 20 years of experience in the industry. We have deep knowledge and a drive to innovate and succeed. You know, I've been told that many of you may not know me yet.
I've only been in the role for a year, so the board suggested we put this slide up to give you a little bit about my experience, but I want to do this a little bit tongue in cheeks. There you go, that's my favorite picture. That's me, a little more hair, my beautiful wife and two of my three children. So that little boy there was about 1 year old in the picture. He's 26 today, just graduated with his doctorate in physical therapy. I'm very proud of him. I love my daughter and wife, too. But the main really topic of this is one of time.
You know, a reflection of my 32 years in the industry, my 15 years with the company, and really combined with the experienced management team, again, that you see here today, really is going to propel us forward to drive success. Let's talk about the core content of today. We're going to talk a little bit about an overview of the industry, a description of our position in the industry, and lastly, our strategic vision to move forward. I'm not going to spend too much time in the industry. You know it well. I'll get through some of these slides fairly quickly, but I'll start with our strong industry dynamics. You guys all know about the high barriers to entry. It's a capital-intensive business.
The fact that we get favorable ECA financing on our new builds, plus the four here that I'll go through really briefly in the next few minutes. I'll start with an increasing awareness of cruising, and it's across all age groups. Just a couple of key stats, you can all read them. One is that 36% of all cruisers are now under 40. Very proud of that we're attracting the new generation, and that cruising is just a sliver of the overall vacation market, representing just 2% of vacations that guests take. In fact, it would take 21 of our newest, largest ships that we just announced to make up just 1% of the overall vacation business. We really believe there's tremendous room for growth ahead. Focus a little bit about the loyalty across all age groups.
You know, when I saw this slide a few weeks ago, it surprised me, but you'll see that there's a strong intent to return across every single demographic, including Millennials and Generation Z. The industry has done a great job in recent years at coming up with new hardware, new amenities, new experiences, and new itineraries that drive this loyalty. In fact, we're seeing, as you see on this part of the slide, we have a higher intention to repeat today than we did in 2019, which heretofore had been our record year. We, of course, believe that cruising delivers an outstanding vacation experience, which represents both an experience and vacation gap versus the hotel industry.
Cruise, of course, we believe, has much better control of our product than the hotel industry does, which we believe will allow us to continue to expand on this experience gap. With the cruise, everything's included. We make this easy for the guests, and we provide a great experience. Of course, at NCLH, across all three of our brands, we're the masters at packaging, so we put even more inclusions in to make the experience gap even higher, which gives us great optimism that we'll be able to close this value gap over the next few years. Of course, the combination of all these factors has led to what we've seen in the industry year after year after year, with the exception of the two years with that little squiggly line. Every year, the cruise industry moves more guests than the year before, this year, next year being no exceptions.
But the part I want to highlight, which isn't really as well known, is the limited supply constraints in the industry. There are only three shipyards in the world that build ships of any scale. In Italy, France, Germany, Finland, four yards, three shipowners, shipbuilders, if you will, and they only have the ability to build about three or four big ships a year, which inherently limits the supply to 3% a year. I think with the backdrop of that demand, with limited supply, we're very optimistic about our abilities to fill the ship and drive pricing. Talk a little bit about NCL's special place in the industry. We believe there are five key dynamics that set our business model apart.
Of course, all predicated by being a good steward to the environment, and let's take a moment to deep dive into all of them. First off, we have a strong profile of three award-winning brands with complementary and non-overlapping offerings. That's key. We believe they're attractive to every segment of the population, with brand propositions appealing to all age groups and demographics, particularly in the middle and upper-income demographics.... Norwegian, of course, is our largest brand, the one that was founded 57 years ago. It's one of the few contemporary brands that appeals to both families and people traveling as adults only. We have fun areas, like our race tracks and aqua coasters, water slides. We also have private, more adult areas, like our Vibe Beach Club and Haven, our industry-leading ship-within-a-ship concept.
David will talk a little bit more about that in his presentation, and of course, we have areas that everyone enjoy, like our expansive entertainment and dining options. Oceania, it's our premium, upper-premium cruise line. It was founded by cruise foodies, run by foodies. There's one right there, he runs it. You won't hear from him today, we didn't have enough time, but he's very proud of his brand. But it's not just about food. We win every food award out there, and let me just spend one more minute on that. We, in fact, have two culinary directors that are both master chefs of France. There's no other cruise line that even has one. But going back, not just about food. We also have outstanding levels of service, attention to detail, curated travel experiences, and overall great experience for the guests that travel.
Our crown jewel, of course, is Regent. There's our brand president, Andrea. She does a fantastic job for us. This is by far the pinnacle of cruise experiences in the industry. Every amenity is included, and our guests are treated like royalty every step along the way. We have a world cruise that we launched a couple of months ago, where the top suite on the world cruise sold within minutes of opening for $1.6 million, and it's worth every penny of it. That's the way to drive revenue. Having Regent in our portfolio elevates or forces us to elevate the experience across all three of our brands, and we're proud of the complementary nature, how we each push each other to do better. Regent on its own garners the highest yields in the industry, and we believe some of the highest margins as well.
Next differentiator is our target of high-net-worth individuals. You can see across all three brands, we hire people in that highest tier of net worth. These guests value their time and are willing to pay for experiences that we provide. They are especially resilient in economic times. In the last great recession before this one, in 2008, we were the first cruise line to get back to our pre-recession yields. We bounced back very quickly. We just saw a report from the Congressional Budget Office last week that showed despite the high inflation we've had the last few years, consumers in the upper income tiers actually have a higher purchasing power today than they did in 2019. Those are the guests that we target. We also partner with personalities and other brands that resonate with our core demographics.
On Regent, we've recently partnered with Aston Martin's Formula One team. I can't wait to try one of those out as soon as Andrea allows me. On the Oceania side, we partner with the food personality, Giada De Laurentiis, one of the loveliest people I've ever met. She truly is as nice as she looks, and she makes one mean lemon ricotta cookie. Frank turned me on to them. Thank you. And on the Norwegian brand, excuse me, we target with Elvis Duran, big DJ here in New York. Maybe you guys listen to him on your drive in. Really a fun person to be around. More close to our hometown in Miami, we partner with the Miami Marlins, not shown here. They actually let me throw out the first pitch last week.
That was like a childhood dream of mine. It went over, it was a strike. You guys can give me a round of applause for that. But it's really fun, and it really engages with our customers to move forward. But now back to business. Third element that sets us apart is our itinerary planning. On the Oceania and Regent brands, our itineraries are well set. We go to interesting places around the world, visiting close to 700 ports, places that are more well-traveled, affluent customers that those brand attracts want to go. But I'll spend another minute or two on NCL. NCL, we take a slightly different philosophy, where we pair our ships with destinations, sending some of our smaller ships to the more exotic destinations, and sending our larger, more amenity-filled ships to our fun-in-the-sun destinations.
We believe that's a great way to balance experience with return, and gives our guests the opportunity on the NCL brand to return over and over and over again, maximizing their lifetime value and driving the high yields that NCL enjoys. In the future, NCL's larger ships with increased amenities, we believe are perfectly suited for the Millennial and Generation Z generations, demographics, and we plan on deploying our marginal capacity towards more fun-in-the-sun destinations, which we define as Caribbean, Hawaii, and Bermuda, which will cumulatively make up 57% of our capacity by 2026. This capacity will also be in shorter-length cruises, which will allow us to have more efficient operations, for an added benefit of enhanced returns from that perspective, from a cost perspective as well. Another important dimension of our itinerary planning is leveraging strengths in regions that we can win.
We have with our increased Caribbean deployment that I talked about in the last slide, it's given us the ability now to invest more in our private island, Great Stirrup Cay, which David will talk a little bit more about in his presentation. Of course, you saw the announcement of our two-ship pier that we made a few weeks ago that will allow us to call on the island nearly 100% of the time. But even with all this increase in capacity, the 54% in fun and sun that I mentioned before, our Caribbean deployment will still represent a tiny fraction of the 350 million annual hotel beds that there are in the region. We're confident that we can fill.... We also have another private island in the Caribbean, Harvest Caye.
It's the only private island in the Western Caribbean, one of the highest-rated destinations for us as well, similar to Great Stirrup Cay. Guests stay on the island all day, which allows us to best monetize the experience for the company, and provides a great experience for the guests clearly as well. But we invest not just in the Caribbean. We've made significant investments in other areas where we can win. We mentioned Alaska, Hawaii, and Bermuda on this chart. Let me just spend a minute on Alaska. We were, of course, the first cruise line to sell round trip from Seattle back in 1999. We have a lot of ships there in the summer, and we have used our scale and experience to partner with local, with local companies to build out facilities in places like Ketchikan, Icy Strait Point, Whittier.
We recently purchased some land in Juneau to build a pier, and of course, in our home port in Seattle. Hawaii and Bermuda, as I mentioned, are other places that we've invested with local operators to make sure that we can maintain and expand on our competitive advantage with our large deployments in those regions. And these are just a few of the examples. We invest where we can win, and we invest where we can have a competitive advantage. Of course, you all have heard about our new build announcement that we made a few weeks ago. This is our bold 8-ship new ship announcement across our three brands. Each brand will have a new 2-class ship offering, which will each represent the largest ships for their respective brands.
NCL, for example, with its NCL 2030 ship, as we refer to them as, delivering close to 5,000 guests, will be a full 56% larger than the ships we delivered in the last two years. We believe this increased space allows for more amenities. Mentioned before, we can attract more young and new-to-cruise guests, a more cost-effective platform, which will provide us the dual objective of delivering what guests value, that ROX concept I talked about before, while having the most efficient operations and delivering on financial returns, the ROI. Of course, while this new build order is significant, it still represents a relative modest growth, a 6% CAGR through 2028, and a 4% CAGR through 2036.
Well, I'll also point out that we have a few vessels that will be turning over 30 years, especially when you get out to the out years, which should allow us to perhaps look for potential other areas to repurpose those ships over time. But even without repurposing, the 4%-6% growth, we believe, is moderate and absolutely fillable. Just to give you a little insight, Mark will talk about this a little further in his presentation, about our ability to fill capacity. You can see historically, with a 7% capacity increase, which is larger than the 4%-6% we're looking to add in the future, we have been able to have an outsized growth in gross revenue, Adjusted EBITDA, and net cash flow.
We believe with the slightly smaller capacity increase going forward, we can even be a bigger earnings powerhouse, which will allow us to achieve the financial metrics we showed before in our Charting the Course strategy. I would be remiss if I didn't say we're also focused on our Sail and Sustain environmental targets, which are listed here. In fact, we're issuing our new Sail and Sustain report in a couple of weeks' time, I think the week of June fifth, so you guys can look out on it. It's very impressive. I saw the first draft last week. We're committed, but we're committed to doing this and returning shareholder value at the same time. So let me now go to the last leg, just a little bit deeper dive into our Charting the Course future. We have a bold vision.
We have a bold vision that we're sharing today to inspire what we do and how we do it best. Our reason for being here is to provide guests with exceptional vacation experiences, what we call to vacation better and experience more. This is the foundation that we believe all 40,000 of our team members can get behind and will resonate with the close to 3,000,000 guests we travel a year, that travel with us a year, excuse me. Let me take a step back to sort of show how we got to where we got to today. Over the last year, I've spent a little time thinking about what the underlying philosophy of this company had been for the last decade. Fundamentally, this had been a founder-led company. Our new approach changes this to focus on a culture where we're going to be more collaborative and team-focused.
We believe our executive leadership team represents a young, powerful force to be reckoned with for decades to come. And however great our founder was, and he was, we believe that our team can collectively deliver better, and we will. Second, we have been passionate about product, and past investments in the brand led to enhanced reputations for all three of our brands for high quality and industry-leading yields. With our product now at a high standard, we can shift our focus to investing in experiences that guests value and are willing to pay for, that focus on ROX and ROI that we keep talking about. Next, in the past, we've been focused a little bit more on smaller ships, disproportionately growing Oceania region in the last few years, and even on the NCL brand, having smaller ships than we had before.
We believe our future is in larger, more efficient ships, with more guest amenities and a more efficient operating platform to drive higher returns. Lastly, in the past, we had a single focus on yields, which did drive the highest yields in the industry, which we continue to have today. But sometimes we didn't have the same discipline on cost. Our future strategy is to continue to focus on yields, but also have a sharp focus on cost control, disciplined capital allocation, measured capacity growth, which will all lead to higher EPS and record ROICs. This vision, as you can see from the previous chart, is supported by these four key pillars, which I refer to as the four Ps: people, product, platform, and performance, which collectively go to a fifth P, a plan for a great future.
Let's just take a quick look at these four pillars and what they mean to us. On the people side, we are committed to being the employer of choice in the markets we operate. We've developed new value anchors around collaboration, innovation, transparency, and passion. Hopefully, you'll see some of that passion here today. As part of this, we're committed to talent development, and I'm thrilled that in our short time together as a new management team, we've already won three awards, which we've never won before, on Healthiest Employer, Best Employer for Diversity, and World's Best Employer for Forbes. But I'm even more proud that we have the highest retention rate as far back as we can measure, exceeding the retention rate that we had in 2019. I can boldly say that the Great Resignation was not a thing at Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings.
The product pillar, of course, key to our success. This is a focus on investments that guests value and are willing to pay for. It revolves around things like having a clear brand message and personalization to attract the right guest, best-in-class packaging, and exceptional onboard experience. We use so many metrics to track our progress, things like acquisition cost, pre-cruise onboard sales, guest satisfaction scores, and future cruises purchased while guests are still on board, which, by the way, are at record levels. But the main metric here is yield and pricing, our continued focus to grow those. Turning to our growth platform, we have several areas of focus, none more important than a sharp focus on ROIC in our ship construction and refurbishment process, which all of my colleagues will talk later on this morning.
We're relentless in the development and construction planning processes to monetize these most important assets. As I mentioned earlier, our new larger ships will allow us to focus on more fun and sun destinations, which will allow us to monetize even more the previous and future investments we're making in port infrastructure like Great Stirrup Cay. Lastly, everything we do is underpinned by a fanatical focus on financial performance, a culture which is embraced throughout the entire organization. Each quarter, as we achieve above historical yield growth and below inflationary cost growth, which results in improved margin, it proves to both the financial community and more importantly, our internal team, that financial excellence is possible and achievable and will continue. Another pillar that embodies this is technology, from revenue management, to itinerary planning systems, to customer service platforms, and the use of artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence is an area that's getting a lot of focus lately, and our leader of the area, Kelly Buckelew, which is with us here today as well, right next to Andrea, he's sort of our resident expert in the field, recently served as a keynote speaker in an AI conference in Silicon Valley just last month. He's super focused on challenging us to develop a state-of-the-art platform in here that can incorporate things from marketing copy, guest chat, website shopping, reservation systems, and onboard sales. Really, the gamut of what we do. Our current investments today have been modest, but the results have already been impressive and will continue to invest in this in the future. So combined, this new vision and strategy leads to a simple yet powerful earnings and return algorithm. Improved yields, cost discipline, leads to margin expansion.
Margin expansion, coupled with moderate capacity growth, leads to outsized EPS growth. EPS growth, combined with the commitment to disciplined capital allocation, which will favor debt repayment in the short to midterm, will all lead to lower leverage, a stronger balance sheet, and record ROIC. So now I'll return to where I started, coming full circle, reasserting our 2026 financial and sustainability targets. We believe each target represents a core metric that will be critical to our future success. Each helps pave the road to financial excellence, and with our clear earnings and return algorithm, we believe these goals are achievable and attainable and provide an attractive investment opportunity for investors. So let me end my time with you today, it's my last slide, to reiterate our key points on why we believe NCLH is a compelling investment opportunity.
I start with our new strategic focus. Our management team is innovative and driven. We are keenly focused on this new operating model, driving yield and controlling cost. We're laser-focused on returns and results, and our algorithm is clear and compelling, imminently executable, and will deliver shareholder value. On the other side of the slide, I'll point out we have a unique growth profile with the fastest yet managed capacity growth, significant margin enhancement, rapid deleveraging, and the highest EPS growth in the industry over the next few years. We're excited about the future, and we hope you are as well. So with that, I'm pleased to turn over the presentation to my colleague, David Herrera, the President of Norwegian Cruise Line. He'll focus on driving the top line at NCL. I've worked with David now for close to a decade. One more minute. I got to say some nice things about you. His experience runs the gamut from finance and strategy to sales and marketing. He's a well-seasoned executive with a strong passion for culture and talent development, and boy, does he have passion?... Thank you all for joining us today. I'll be back later for some comments, but for now, David Herrera. Thanks, Jeff. Good job.
Thank you, Harry, for that fantastic introduction. He does that every time I enter a room. It's really, really reassuring. Thank you, guys, for being here. It is a pleasure. I'm gonna talk about two specific things. I'm gonna talk a little bit about NCL. I'm gonna reinforce what our value proposition is, what attracts people to NCL, what makes them so loyal, and then, of course, I'm gonna dive a little bit deeper into a lot of the initiatives that Harry mentioned to give you a sense for what we're doing and why we're so excited right now at this point in our company history. So Harry mentioned this, NCL is a very different company today than we were just a few short years ago.
In 2024, we're gonna carry well over 2.5 million guests on our 19 ships. We're gonna depart from 50 unique ports, and we're gonna visit over 400 destinations. Right now, on our ships, right now, there are 59,103 guests having a fantastic time, and you can check that number. I can't tell you exactly what everybody's doing right now, but I can give you a very clear appreciation for what drew them to NCL. This is what our brand stands for. Harry mentioned this. At NCL, we aspire to give everyone the best vacation they can every time they get on our ships. Consumer research and marketing analytics are more front and center than they've ever been in our company. A value-centric onboard package designed for multiple demographics is the way that we win.
Whether you're a young couple on their honeymoon, or you're a solo senior traveler taking advantage of our award-winning and expanded solo cabin selection, or you're a group, maybe an investor group that's looking to learn a little bit more and wants to buy some cabins, let me know. I can hook you up. Our goal is to provide an elevated cruise experience and give people the opportunity to choose what they want to do on our ships. Give a very specific example, and Harry mentioned it a little bit, The Haven. How many people here know what The Haven is on an NCL ship? Oh, you guys are all VIPs because The Haven is our VIP ship-within-a-ship concept. It's only about 5% of our cabins, but it is an unparalleled experience.
The Haven, the moment a guest steps onto a ship, and she's handed her first glass of champagne by her butler, and she's escorted into the VIP Haven Lounge, where she meets with the concierge, and they finalize any last-minute plans that she might have on her cruise, that is an unparalleled experience, and that is what we aspire to provide. Everyone in this room is a consumer. We all notice and appreciate when a brand goes out of their way to understand what we want. Give us what we aspire, give us the opportunity and the experience that we want. That's what we do. That is NCL today. Okay, top-line growth. Harry's making me talk about it. You guys want to hear about it. Let's dive into it a little bit, and let's just talk about how we're gonna drive profitable top-line growth into the future.
As Harry mentioned, these are the four pillars. I'm gonna spend a lot of time talking about our guest-centric product offering. We are fully aligned as a management team that these are the critical pillars for us to focus on. Bluntly, we know that this is an inflection point in our company's history. We feel it, we understand it, we see the opportunity, and we are absolutely aligned in our efforts and our goals to realize this... charting this new course strategy. So over the next few minutes, I'm gonna focus on guest-centric product offering. What exactly do we mean by that? Okay, our business is making sure people have a good time on a cruise ship, but our job, our work, starts the moment someone starts thinking about taking a cruise.
A seamless journey from dreaming to cruising, every step along the way of the marketing and the booking funnel, our job is. Guests are looking for a premium experience at a great value that is easy to book. That's the opportunity for us. It's that simple. This is how we will grow and exceed our historical net yield growth. Personalized offerings, not only are they accretive to yield, which we all care about, but it impacts the guest experience. It makes it easier for us to get guests to come back and get them to say nice things about us, so they tell their friends, and more people get on our ships. This complete view of the consumer journey is why, and Harry mentioned this earlier, NCL maintains the highest yields in our sector. All right, so how do we do it?
Okay, today I'm gonna focus on just five of the key levers that our company is utilizing to drive this performance. As we all know, there is not one silver bullet for success. Behind each of these five levers are a lot of little levers, a lot of little decisions. You got to win a little bit more every single day. While there's five arrows here, they all have one common theme, driving a higher overall total yield. Please allow me to dive a little bit deeper into each initiative. Let's start with the first one, new build design with richer cabin mix. When people dream about taking a cruise, they don't dream about an inside cabin....
They dream about being able to walk out, step onto their private balcony, breathe in that sea air, and appreciate the majesty that is the open water, and they're willing to pay a premium for that. In fact, the average balcony sells for double the price of an inside cabin. That's why, as we build our ships, we focus on a richer cabin mix. A ship that has a higher balcony mix will generate a higher yield, simple as that. In fact, by 2026, two-thirds of all the cabins on our fleet will be balcony or even higher. Okay, so once you have these amazing ships built, the next step is figuring out where they go. Our consumer research is absolutely clear: the itinerary is one of the key factors in the purchase decision.
Our guests just don't want to go on a cruise. They want to have a bucket list experience, whether that's visiting the Colosseum in Rome, seeing a glacier in Alaska, or just going fishing off of Roatán in Honduras. A bucket list is different for everybody. The reason they want to have it, they want to be able to go back and tell their family and friends that they did it. So when we think about fleet expansion, we think about it starting at our core. Our fleet expansion allows us to maintain and enhance our strong market positions in high-yielding markets like Europe and Alaska, but it also allows us to expand on our fun in the sun options, including the competitive advantages that we have in Bermuda and Hawaii, as Harry mentioned.
This new capacity that's coming to the Caribbean is going to come in the form of 3-, 4-, 5-, and 7-night cruises. By default, that will end up reducing the average length that we have on our entire fleet. Interestingly, it's going to make us even more efficient, because by 2026, 80% of our cruises are going to embark from the top 10 ports. Why does this matter? Increasing operating efficiencies will make the experience better and yield higher returns. It'll make the embark process smoother. It'll make the debark process smoother. It'll make provisioning more efficient. It'll allow for our captains to have more familiarity with the routes and therefore save money on fuel. All these benefits of a more consistent deployment will lead to overall higher yields and higher guest satisfaction.
Another benefit of this additional Caribbean capacity, and we've heard, we've heard this from you, and we've heard this from a lot of our guests, they're very excited about the opportunity to monetize on our private island, Great Stirrup Cay, which we lovingly call GSC. It's really just the initials. It doesn't really mean anything. Both GSC and Harvest Caye provide well-balanced offerings that are an extension of the experience on the ship. We're not trying to build the world's largest theme park on our Bahamian paradise. What we're going to do is, we're going to add new amenities and new features that, yes, it's going to move us a little closer to a land-based vacation, which is what our guests have been asking us for. They want the opportunity. They want the new experiences. They want the ability to visit GSC on every call.
Fortunately for us, GSC happens to be the largest of all the private islands, so we have the footprint, now that we have the investment and we have the master plan, to add these new amenities while still providing our guests all of the opportunities and experiences that they've had up until now. Our guests are asking for more Caribbean options. They've been asking for a while, and the fact that we are increasing our fleet enables us to provide our guests what they want. And this is truly exciting. All of us are thrilled with the opportunity to design an island. How cool is that? Design a new island. But the reality is, GSC is pretty awesome right now.
It's actually one of our highest-rated ports of call, and now that we have a pier, we're going to have a pier, that means that we're going to call consistently. Tendering during the winter months in GSC has been a challenge, and unfortunately, we end up missing the island. Not only does that impact our yield, but that impacts the guest experience. People look forward to visiting GSC. So now we can have a thoughtful and ROI-centric investment strategy to invest and build new revenue-generating opportunities, experiences on GSC. We got to hurry up, because from now to 2026, by 2026, we're going to increase our passenger count by 75%. That's okay. More opportunity to get more guests, more revenue-generating opportunities, higher yield. I'm going to talk for a minute about Silver Cove.
In the same way that The Haven is our VIP experience on the ship, Silver Cove is the VIP experience on the island. A bunch of private villas surrounding an exclusive lagoon where you're waited on by our amazing crew and team, that's another unparalleled experience, and it's one that guests are willing to pay a very healthy premium for. So by having more guests call consistently on GSC, that means more guests get to experience Silver Cove, and that not only supports revenue, but again, supports the guest experience. So to optimize this, this yield expansion, we also have a new approach to revenue management. The role that revenue management plays in the success of NCL cannot be overstated. We are always looking to improve the best practices so that we can maximize yield.
We have to be maniacal about staying on, and maybe even getting ahead of the booking curve sometimes. Maximizing every dollar from every cabin on every voyage is a must, and we do this by investing in new platforms and technologies that make that happen. Give you one specific example of the opportunity of having, selling premium, paying, having our guests pay a premium for category-level upgrades. As we get closer to sailing, on those rare times that we have a balcony cabin open, it is much more efficient for us to sell that balcony cabin to an oceanview guest, have them pay a premium. If they pay that premium, we now have an empty oceanview cabin. Guess what? It's an opportunity for an inside guest to pay us a premium to get into that oceanview cabin.
In the end, we're left with an inside cabin, which is a much lighter lift for us, but we've generated extra revenue without incurring an expensive acquisition cost of finding a new guest to buy a balcony cabin. This is an incredibly tedious process that has been expedited because of the investment that we made in technology to make this seamless, fluid, and effective for us as an organization. This constant rigor that we have in revenue management has to be partnered with the same thoughtful and data-driven approach to marketing. As the former CMO, I might be a little bit biased, but I'm pretty sure my marketing team's the best one in the world. We have installed a new culture of objectively measuring and leveraging analytics while investing in technology. What have we accomplished?
Well, as you can see, we've increased our marketable database by 77% since 2019, and we've increased web visits by 39% over that same time period. We continue to get smarter and more efficient at our full funnel analysis of our multimedia mix strategy to attract both new to brand and new to cruise. Those two areas have to grow, not just for NCL, but for the entire industry, and that's why we're excited about the investment that the industry is making in this. But there's a third bucket. There's a third bucket of guests that we already have a running head start on, and those are our very loyal past guests. Not only do they have a lower acquisition cost, but they truly do become ambassadors, both on and off the ship.
Our past guests love us, and a clear indicator of that is our ability to sell them CruiseNext certificates. CruiseNext certificates are deposits which are value-centric coupons that guests purchase when they're on board, and it serves as a non-refundable deposit for their next cruise. They're not even sure when their next cruise is going to be, but they are so loyal and so enamored with our product, that our sales team, as you can see, do an amazing job of talking to them when they're on the ship and getting them excited about their next cruise. The benefits for us as an organization are cash flow and a pipeline of future bookings. I want to touch briefly on the right side, the Cruise First. Harry had mentioned the squiggly lines in one of the last, one of his last slides.
In 2020 and 2021, we didn't have any guests on the ship to sell them CruiseNext certificates, so we got creative. We got in the lab, we collaborated, 'cause that's what we do as a management team, and we figured something out. We created a pre-cruise version of CruiseNext, and we called it Cruise First, but now we sold it at point of sale. It was a hit. Still serves as a deposit, still non-refundable, still same terms and conditions, but it's just a land-based version of CruiseNext. As you can see, both of these unique value-centric offers continue to grow significantly year-over-year, and this will also help drive yield and help fill all these beautiful ships that we have coming. This is just one example of our constant sales and marketing efforts throughout the entire guest journey. That is in our DNA.
This last point is about the guest journey specifically. As I mentioned earlier, we have the mindset that our job starts when someone starts thinking about buying a cruise. Candidly, our efforts to monetize that interest starts shortly thereafter. That is why we have the best onboard revenue in the industry. At the point of sale, we reinforce our premier package, which is called Free at Sea. Free at Sea is a value-centric package that allows our guests to enjoy beverage, dining, Wi-Fi, and a shore extension credit. 90% of our guests participate in one or more of these components. We see more opportunity here. Over the next few months, we are going to be considering, analyzing, maybe even announcing decisions that are going to help drive our yield, specifically as a result of the new approach to Free at Sea.
This level of demand reinforces the extra earning potential. These multiple touch points, many of them pre, during, and post-cruise, not only help with the cash flow, but they also drive an increase of onboard revenue, as you can see, almost 30% since 2019. Look, as I mentioned, these are only five of the many initiatives that we are working on to drive top-line growth. I assure you, we have many more. As Harry mentioned, and Mark will reinforce in his section as well, our goal is to deliver higher than historical yield growth while we continue to grow our fleet. Our entire management team is 100% aligned, and we are absolutely thrilled about this opportunity ahead of us. It's an exciting time to be at NCLH. Thank you for your time. At this point in our program, I'm going to stop talking. We're going to get 15 minutes to have coffee, and then when we come back, you're going to hear from my outstanding operating partner, Patrik Dahlgren, and of course, someone you guys know well, our CFO, Mark Kempa. Thank you very much.