Right. As you can see, she's beautiful, and we promise after we talk to you for an hour and a half in these seats, we will let you all explore the ship as well. Joining me today, we have Frank Del Rio, the President and CEO of Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings, and Mark Kempa, our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. In addition to Frank and Mark, we have many others from our executive leadership team that are joining us here today. I wanna very quickly introduce a few of our senior leaders so that you can have a face to the name. When I call your name, can you just stand up and wave to the crowd here? We have Harry Sommer, who's the President and CEO of Norwegian Cruise Line.
Jason Montague, who's the President and CEO of Regent Seven Seas Cruises. Howard Sherman, who is the President and CEO of Oceania Cruises. Ross Henderson, who is our EVP of Onboard Revenue and Destination Services. Robin Lindsay, who's the EVP of Vessel Operations. We have Dan Farkas, our EVP and General Counsel. Our leaders will be available here for Q&A, and they will be at the lunch, so we encourage all of you to stop by and say hello. Okay, here's today's agenda. We've got quite a bit to cover today. I wanna level set first. There's been a lot of change over the past few years, including in this room.
We've structured our presentation to provide some insight and to inform both those who are new to our story and to the cruise industry and those of you who have been following us for a long time. Our goal here is for you to take away a stronger understanding of our business, what we do, where we're headed, and what makes Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings unique. Frank is gonna start us off with a quick overview of our company, followed by our strategic outlook, where he will discuss what we think are our key value drivers. Mark will then provide a broader business and financial update. Then lastly, we'll end with Q&A, both from this audience and also from the shareholders who participated via our Say platform online. Now to the fun stuff. Our presentation today is available on our investor relations website.
Our commentary includes forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially. These statements should be considered in conjunction with the cautionary statement in our presentation. Our comments may also reference non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are available in our presentation. You all can thank Dan Farkas for that part of the presentation. With that, it's my pleasure to welcome Mr. Frank Del Rio to the stage to provide a company overview and strategic outlook.
Thank you. Well, good morning, everyone, and thanks for showing up today. I know for many of you it's a trek to come here on the Hudson, but I think that today's presentation will be very worthwhile for you to learn more about our company, a little bit about our industry. As Jessica mentioned, there's been a lot of changes, as you know, and over the last 30 months since the pandemic began. Our shareholder base has turned quite a bit. Many of you in this room are new to cruise. I see a lot of familiar faces but also some new ones.
Before we get into all the details that we wanna get across to you today, I want you to think about a couple of things that we hope you can take away from today, from this presentation today. The first one is we're different. One of the things that frustrates us, and I know that frustrates some of you in the audience as well, is that you assume that whatever happens to some of our peers is at some point gonna happen to us. We've told you time and time again, that's not true. Just not true. Look at us as a standalone company. Don't throw us into the pool of the cruise industry, because we're different. We have a different fleet. We have a different management team, obviously. We have a different philosophy on how to operate our business. We focus on different things.
If you'll see today through the presentation, the results that we have been able to print over the last few years before the pandemic prove that out. We're different. Pricing is sacred to us. At the end of the day, this is primarily a fixed cost business, although inflation has had our attention lately. It is a relatively fixed cost business, and you win, in our opinion, based on price. We're gonna hammer that home time and time again, and I hope you guys are listening. A quick overview of our company. Three brands, one in each of the industry's major groups: contemporary space, Norwegian, premium, Oceania, luxury, Regent. Now, in every one of those cases, we wanna operate at the very upper end within the contemporary space.
We don't want Norwegian to cross over to the premium space because we got a premium brand called Oceania, and we don't want Oceania to jump over to the luxury space because we got Regent there. Each one of those upper-end positionings allows us to generate the highest prices. See, I'm gonna start early. The highest prices in the industry by far. Our three brands visit over 500 destinations around the world, and we will carry roughly 3 million guests in 2023. We also have two incredible island destinations, one in the Bahamas, Great Stirrup Cay. We've had it for almost 25 years.
We invested a lot of money in upgrading her over the last four or five years, and we're the only cruise company that actually has a private destination in the Western Caribbean called Harvest Caye in Belize. Today we're gonna talk quite a bit about our value drivers. What makes us different than the only other cruise lines that I talked about. What makes us different, why you should not lump us with everyone else. We are not all created equal. I talked about our three brands at the high end of the respective market categories, making us the dominant operator offering upscale experiences. When you walk around this vessel, this is a contemporary vessel. This is not your grandfather's contemporary vessel.
You know, we like to say that good taste doesn't cost any more than bad taste, and I think you'll recognize what I mean by that when you walk around this vessel, you see the offerings, you see the staterooms, and you can see why this vessel is commanding the high premium pricing that it is. This ship just finished a transatlantic. It generated onboard revenue more than double our transatlantic average, and, I mean, she wasn't even full. So as a company, we have 29 vessels. That's sizable. We've got girth, but we're not so big that we don't know what to do with the vessels. We still have many, many unserved and underserved markets that will bode well for our growth.
As you know, we have eight ships coming online over the next five years, five more Prima, two for Oceania, one for Regent, three next year, one for each brand. We believe that we will be able to, we know we'll have a fantastic growth, 50% growth over 2019 level on an adjusted basis for 2023, 23%, over 19. We have a differentiated, and this is one of the points that I really want you guys to listen to. We have a differentiated go-to-market strategy, which allows us to generate these industry-leading yields. We don't lead the industry by a little bit. Mark will show you what, how we performed as recent as Q2 of this past year, and later in my presentation, I'll show you historically how we've done.
We beat the competitors, and you know who the competitors are. I'm not gonna mention them by name, but you know who they are. We don't beat them by a nose. We beat them by a wide margin. We believe that go-to-market strategy of market to fill, not discount to fill, is the winning formula. You saw what happens just recently, what happens when companies don't follow that pricing power philosophy. We have the right team in the right place. The guys that you were just introduced to, Mark, we've been together a long, long time. Harry and I go back 30 years. Howard, 27, 28. Jason and I started Oceania from scratch 20 years ago. Robin and I, 20 years ago. Mark is the rookie. We've only been together 9 years, but that's long enough.
We've got a great team. We know what to do. We've gone through hard times before. We'll show you what we've done during the hard times. We know this playbook. We know how to get out of the situation we're in, and we're getting out of it, not because I'm hoping to. I'm not hoping because we're wishing it will. We're gonna show you numbers. We're gonna show you where we stand for 2023. Early on in this presentation, I'm telling you that we will have record-breaking pricing, record-breaking yields in 2023, and we'll have record EBITDA. Okay. A little more about the individual brands. Norwegian Cruise Line is our largest company, largest brand, contemporary space. We have 18 vessels. Oceania is the leading upper premium brand.
We have six vessels today, two more on order, the first one coming online in May, Vista. Regent today has five vessels, another one coming in the end of 2023, Grandeur. Regent is all-inclusive luxury. You can't do better than Regent. If money was no object, you're going on Regent. To give you an example, there's one suite on Explorer, Splendor, and Grandeur that goes for $12,000 per night. Per night. It's always sold out. Jason, you've done a great job with that brand, and Howard with the Oceania brand, and certainly Harry with the Norwegian brand. Here's where our brands stack up next to the competition. As you can see, each one of them is at the upper end of their respective categories in the luxury, premium, contemporary.
One of the wonderful things about our company is these three unique brands don't really compete with one another. You know, others have so many brands that they sabotage each other. We don't. We don't have that problem. Next. We're the dominant cruise operator in the upscale brand. So between Oceania, Regent, the vessels that are coming online for them, and then the Haven Suites on board the Norwegian brand, we have more upscale berths, 9,200, than anyone else by a long shot. Why is that important? Well, this is one of the reasons why we have the highest yields. Not the only reason, but one of the reasons. The other one is these vessels, not just the Oceania and Regent brands, but all the vessels are focused on operating premium itineraries.
The number one driver of yields, and those of you who have known me for a long time have heard me say this over and over again, the number one driver of yields of ticket pricing is your itinerary. If I asked you, "Steve, let's go on a cruise," first thing you're gonna ask me is, "Where are we going?" Itineraries drives pricing, and we have more premium itineraries than anyone else. You can see the shift between 2019 and 2023, the arrow's pointing up. Alaska, Europe, premium itineraries. The Caribbean, low price itineraries going down. Let's talk about guest demographics. We are a US-centric company. Now, maybe someday that'll come and bite me in the ass. Not today. Not with a strong dollar. Not with the rest of the world having economic concerns, especially Europe probably is already in a recession.
The U.S. is still the best place to do business. American consumers are the best cruise customers. They book the earliest. Gives me greater visibility. Greater visibility means I can raise prices because I have confidence I'm gonna go full. That is key. You'll see our booking curve in a minute. They book higher cabin categories, and they spend the most money on board. So we like American consumers. Now, we don't only live by American consumers. You can see roughly 80% U.S., 20% rest of the world. I like that balance. The generational mix. We don't rely just on the old baby boomers, although they are the dominant at nearly 40%, but depending on the itinerary, depending on the ship, depending on the brand, we go down to Gen X, Millennials, even Gen Z. The quality of the customer.
You've also heard me say that we go after a quality customer. You know, with only 29 vessels, I don't have to go to every corner of the world to fill the vessels. 29, 3 million guests a year, but we target a quality customer, and as you can see in the bottom right-hand corner, 94%-95% of our Oceania and Regent guests have net worth over a quarter million dollars. Or two-thirds or so for the Norwegian brand. That bodes well for us. These people are more resilient if there is an economic downturn. They have the money to spend on ticket and on board. One of the reasons why we lead the industry in yields is our quality customer. I don't need to rest. There we go. Best-in-class fleet. Youngest fleet of the major operators. Why is that important?
If you have newer ships, they're more efficient, less fuel consumption, less repairs and maintenance, more balcony cabins. The second leading driver of yields after itineraries is the cabin mix, and we have the richest cabin mix, and it's growing as it's improving as we add on the newer vessels. Innovative hardware. I hope you guys have a chance to spend an hour or so on board after the presentation, after lunch, just to walk around. This is not your grandfather's cruise ship. This is. This has got everything you could imagine. We worked hard to put together a package, if you will, of wonderful accommodations, incredible restaurants, and then fun stuff, the racetrack, Galaxy Pavilion, the dry slides.
Hardware, at the end of the day, counts, and we have invested heavily, not just in the new builds, but also in our legacy fleet, that we've always kept them up at the highest possible level of condition. We've upgraded them whenever possible, and that allows us also to drive yields. What we do is we take our legacy fleet, if you will, and put them in more exotic and longer itineraries, and itineraries where families may not go, that don't need the racetrack. When you go from Bangkok to Tokyo on an 18-day cruise, you're not worried about the rush slide or the racetrack. It's itinerary-focused, and you saw that itinerary is the number one driver. Here is our industry-leading growth profile. It's not too much. It's not too little. It's just right.
We were very fortunate that during the pandemic, we didn't have to take any vessels. It worked out that way. We took delivery of Encore in late 2019. We took delivery of Splendor for the Regent brand in early 2020. Nothing in the rest of 2020, nothing in 2021, and just last month we took delivery of Prima. Next year we have three deliveries, one for each brand. Standalone brands, they don't compete with one another necessarily, so we're very comfortable taking delivery of three vessels next year, one for each brand. As you can see, one in 2024, two in 2025, one in 2026, one in 2027. This will generate a 50% capacity growth from 2019 levels. 50%. Are we a growth company? Are we a value company? I think we're both.
This is a very, a very digestible, if you will, pace of adding new builds. Look what we've done in the past when we've taken on deliveries. I know some of you, especially the analyst community, have always worried about, oh, too much capacity growth. You know, the historical capacity growth is 3% or 4% and some years it's gonna go to 5% or 6%. Relax. I think we proved to you guys during prior to the pandemic that the industry was well-poised to absorb more of this high-end, high-quality vessels. Certainly, we need more vessels because we have dozens of unserved and underserved markets that we simply don't have ships to go to. You know, there are some competitors that have 15 vessels, 18 vessels in Alaska.
We've got six. There are competitors that have vessels year-round in Australia. We don't. In the U.K., we don't. In Europe, we don't year-round. Who have year-round operations out of Texas, out of Alabama, out of New Orleans, out of Tampa, we don't. Why? We simply don't have the ships. We're looking forward to our vessels, but look at what we've done historically by this management team. We grew our capacity days by 7% over that five-year period. Maybe we grow our revenue 7%, right? No. We grew our revenue 11% because these are high-yielding vessels. More revenue, more demand. Maybe if you grew revenue 11%, we grow EBITDA 11%. No, we beat EBITDA by almost 20%, 13%, and then cash provided by operating activities, 15%. Cash provided by operating activities, more than double capacity growth.
Mark in his presentation will show you how we finance these vessels. If you were us, you'd do the same thing. You'd keep adding ships until the market said, "No mas," and the market has said no mas to us, nowhere near that. This is what we've done in the past, and I can look you in the eye and tell you this is what we're gonna do in the future. I talked a little bit about our islands in the Bahamas and in Belize, but also Alaska.
We've made quite a number of investments in Alaska, and Alaska is one of those premium destinations that we're now circling around, and I don't wanna say we own Alaska because that would be a little overstated, but we are in a great position to have our own facilities, our own docks, so we can grow our capacity in Alaska by investing in Ward Cove and Icy Strait. In Juneau, we're about to make a big investment in Whittier, so we can do more turnarounds there. You know, Alaska has not only become a premium destination, but it's become more than just a four-month summer destination like it used to be. It used to be, you know, mid-May to mid-September. We now get there in early April, and we don't leave until mid-October.
It's a combination of perhaps global warming, bigger vessels, more demand. We've stretched that season to almost seven months now, and it's a great place to be. Unique to go-to-market strategy. We live and die by this. You saw what happens when cruise companies discount to fill. Nothing good happens. We're gonna show you two numerical examples, one by me, one by Mark a little later, of what happens when you go to the dark side. We market to fill. We'll spend whatever we have to spend. You know, I kid around, and Mark hates when I say this, but the marketing budget is always in pencil because it is whatever it has to be to fill the vessels, because there's always an ROI, a multiple. We don't want empty cabins, and we don't want the discount.
Do we ever price adjust? Yeah, we price adjust, of course, to be competitive. But we're not, we're not selling cruises for $20 a day. You'll see what the cumulative effect of how we do it compared to how others do it. Please, if there's one thing you remember today, it's that. How we price, how we go to market. Go back one, please. We love bundling, right? To us, it's never about the price. Price is irrelevant almost. It's the deal. What's the deal on going on a cruise? Steve, if I told you we're going on a cruise and it's $9.99, what does $9.99 mean? If I told you get two for one this and three for one that, and you get free this, and you get free that, you get excited because it's a deal.
We focus on the deal. We focus on bundling stuff that you normally would buy on a cruise. Shore excursions, drink package, dining packages, Wi-Fi, and each brand does it slightly different because they have slightly different markets, slightly different audiences, big difference in pricing, but they all are focused on bundling, and they're all focused on market to fill, staying on that booking curve. Mark will talk more about that later as well. Here's an example of this bundling. Norwegian's Free at Sea participation. In 2018, roughly half the customers that we sold cruises to bought the bundled package with the free stuff that I mentioned. 85% in 2022 for 2023. I mean, it's unbelievable. Now, why is that important? First of all, a bundled cruise is stickier than just your plain vanilla ticket to come on board. Stickier, less cancellations.
Less cancellations, less churn for marketing. They pay a higher deposit. More cash comes in early, more visibility. Fresh wallet concept. Can't stress that enough. If you spend all this money upfront, you'll see in a minute, the average booking curve now is 255 days, 8.5 months. You buy this bundled package today, and you got 8.5 months to save some money, so when you come on board. You got a fresh wallet, and guess what? You spend all over again. We just saw it on this vessel on this past cruise that ended yesterday. Double the average that we have for a transatlantic. That's key. Here are the onboard revenue streams. You know, shore excursions, the biggest one. Casino, big, big driver. And Ross and his team...
By the way, all this credit goes to Ross Henderson and his team. They do a fantastic job in onboard revenue. I don't think there's another company that focuses on onboard revenue like we do. We have a top-notch executive. All he does all day long in his team is onboard. He's not worried about filling the ship. That's somebody else's job. They're his when they get on board, and he does a great job of squeezing every dollar out of them. Let's go to the next slide. Distribution channel. What we saw during the pandemic, everybody went online, right? You bought your toilet paper online through Amazon. You bought Peloton online. You bought everything online. Well, you bought cruises too. So you can see that the travel agent channel has actually decreased from 2019 - 2023. Look what went up.
Direct went up a lot. The direct web, the cheapest of all channels, direct web. It's direct. There's no commission involved, and there's no human intervention at our end involved. So if this is good, better, best, that's what we have here. We love travel agent business. We do everything we can to generate business through them. It is still our largest channel, but it is no longer the fastest growth channel. The fastest growth channel for us is direct, and actually, direct web is the fastest-growing, and we're spending quite a bit of investment, and time, and effort in putting forth all the technologies needed to really increase that share. Differentiated pricing drivers. Why do people pay us more to come on board? No, I won't do it, Mark. That's your slide.
Why do people pay a lot more to come on board the three Norwegian brands than on competitors? Number one, driver of yields, itineraries. I get criticized for this because maybe I should be doing something else with my time, but I spend more time on itineraries across all three brands than I do just about anything else. Maybe building the ships with Robin. That's how important itineraries are. We live and die by itineraries. The right ship at the right place at the right time is key. Hardware. Can't discount the hardware, and we've invested heavily in new hardware, as we've talked about. We've invested heavily in refurbishing our older vessels, our legacy fleet. You know, too many companies only focus on their newest baby, the shiny new toy. You're here today. We do that as well.
We don't forget the legacy fleet because you know what? Three years from now, this ship won't be the shiny new object. Something else will be. We focus on premium vessels, premium hardware, premium itineraries, premium food. Every one of our brands stands for something. The Norwegian brand stands for great entertainment. I wish you guys can stay overnight and see the Donna Summer show. Donna herself would be very proud. The food on board Norwegian is the best of any contemporary line. It's learned from its sister brands, Oceania and Regent. Fantastic premium mix of cabins. We talked about it. 60% premium going to 65% by the end of 2027 when these other eight ships come online. We market to fill.
We put our money where our mouth is, and we will do whatever we can, whatever we have to do to stimulate demand, especially U.S.-based demand, to fill these vessels at high prices. I talked about the booking window. I'm sorry, I said 255 earlier. It's 245. Look how it's grown over the last five years. Almost 50% from 171 days - 45 days. What does this mean? It means people are booking with us earlier than ever. Why is that good? Well, the first is cash comes in the door. People pay hefty deposits to make their booking. That means they also pay earlier than if it was a last-minute booking. The most important result of people booking early is it gives us visibility, right?
If the two extremes are people book two years in advance or people book the day before the cruise, which one of those two do you think you get higher pricing on? The first one. Having this early warning system allows us to moderate marketing. Let's not waste marketing dollars if we don't have to. If this cruise is booking like crazy, let's raise prices. You know, we don't set prices, kidding around with some folks here. Remember Ronco? Remember Ronco on TV? Set it and forget it. Well, we don't do set it and forget it. We manage those prices daily. We have a team of, we call the video gamers, and their job is they're assigned a vessel. They look at each cabin, each sailing, each ship every day looking for opportunities to raise prices.
We've been raising prices, and you'll see that in a moment. When you have this kind of visibility, 8.5 months on average. When we tell you that we think 2023 is gonna be a fantastic year, record EBITDA, record yield, it's not because I wish it to be true or I hope it to be true. It's 'cause I got the bookings, and the bookings are occurring earlier than ever. The visibility is better than ever. My confidence is greater than ever to tell you that that's what's gonna happen. This is our report card. This is 2019, the last of the great years before the great pandemic hit. How do we do on Net Yield? Ticket yield? How do we do on onboard revenue?
How do we do on overall yields? You can see, and you can imagine who peer one and peer two are. Don't look at the colors. That's not a hint. 18% greater than peer one, 36% greater than peer two. That's just to get on board. Then onboard revenue, a third higher against peer one, two-thirds higher than peer two. Now you might say, "Well, Frank, that's because you've got such heavily weighted on Oceania and Regent, drives all those numbers up." You might be true on ticket, but you'd be wrong on onboard because there's so much inclusivity on Oceania and Regent, it actually brings the numbers down. Let me say this, and I won't give you the number, but I'll give you directionally. If we were talking about Norwegian as a standalone company, it'd still be number one.
Still be number one. Go to the next slide. Yields are great. That's nice, Frank Del Rio. How much of it dropped to the bottom line? Even though we are the smallest of the big three, you might think we don't have the scale to suppress costs. On an EBITDA per capacity day, we beat the blues by 12% and the reds by over 50%. That top line does drop to the bottom line. Are our costs higher? Yeah. If you expect people to pay you $12,000 a day for a suite, you better not give them, you know, chopped steak for dinner. Jason Montague's filets cost a lot of money, but he gets it. He gets the return on it. You can see here, $95 a day, 50% better than some others. Let's pivot a little bit.
We've talked a lot about Norwegian. Let's talk about the industry, how that industry dynamics affect us. Let's take the top two on the right sort of as one. Limited capacity growth. There's only four cruise, or shipyards in the world that build cruises. Germans, the Finns, which is owned by the Germans, the French and the Italians. As much as some of you guys worry about capacity growth, stop it, and you'll see in a minute what the capacity or what the inventory of cruise cabins are compared to hotels, for example. There's a limited number of ships that can be delivered no matter what. The barriers to entry are great.
If Ivan and I wanted to start a new cruise line tomorrow, Ivan and I figure we need about $1 billion because we've got to order at least four ships, $1 billion each, 20% down is $800 million, and we need $200 million working capital, establish a brand, hire a few people, start marketing. $1 billion. By the way, that $1 billion is gonna be dead for about 5-6 years, because that's how long it's gonna take for you to get your first ship. Barriers to entry are steep because of high capital costs and the long waiting period. If you're in the business, you're in luck because new-build financing, and Mark's gonna go over great detail on that a little later, is phenomenal. We financed this vessel, I think at 3%.
Under 3%.
Under 3%, 12 years fixed. Any of the debt guys in the room, can you do better than that? I don't think so. If you were us, and you can buy an asset that lasts 30 years, that's always full, that generates the kind of EBITDA you saw, that you can finance with 20% down over the construction period at 3% or less fixed for 12 years, how many would you order? I think you'd order all you could. Favorable tax structure. Not many of you know about Section 883 of the IRS code. We know all about it. That resulted in us paying an effective tax rate of about 3%. 3%. Whatever we make, we keep. Under-penetrated global markets. You're gonna see later, only 30 million people in the world cruised in 2019. 30 million.
A little over half were Americans. We are the most under-penetrated, underserved of the big three cruise companies because we only have 29 vessels. A lot of opportunity for upside. We've got movable assets. We have an engine, we have propellers, we have rudders. We can put the ships where they're gonna generate the most money. You build a building wherever, and it's stuck there. It's not going anywhere. We've got flexibility. We can move ships to high-potential areas, take them out of low-potential areas. We talked about highly favorable demographic trends. We talked about that. The boomers, 10,000 of them, retire every day. They've got the time, they've got the money. The value proposition of cruising, that's another thing I want you to walk away with remembering. The value proposition. You'll see some schedules later.
A cruise for two, for four on a ship like Prima is gonna cost you 40%-50% less than a comparable vacation on land. 40%-50% less. If times do get a little rough around the edges, if the economy does start to stumble, I believe that people will look for value more so than ever before, and they're gonna find it in the cruise industry. Go to the next one. This is a chart going back to 2001 of how many people cruise in the world. You see 9/11. Every year, the number of people that cruise is greater than the year before.
No matter what happens in the world, not 9/11, not the Great Recession, not the 14 geopolitical events that took place in 2016, has the growth of passengers, not capacity, passengers ever stumbled. We believe that 2023 will be the first full year since the pandemic, and you're gonna see that number also exceed 2019. Resiliency. This is CLIA's best guess, and it's a guess. I don't think they're too far off because it mirrors very much capacity, 'cause ships are always full. The question of the cruise industry is not are the ships full or not, at what price? That's where we excel. You saw the example of 2019. You're gonna see more examples of second quarter 2022 when Mark comes up.
This is one of those schedules I wanted to talk to you about of the under-penetrated cruise market globally. On the left, you see the percentage of the target population of each country that has ever cruised. Target population to my sprint is people over who make more than $40,000 and ages between 25 and 74. That's de minimis in terms of income. Nevertheless, you can see the U.S., only 7% of Americans have ever cruised. 7%. Look at the right side. If you take all the cruise ships in the world, all of them, their staterooms, they still have less staterooms, less cabins than the top three cities in the U.S., which is Las Vegas, Orlando and Chicago.
If you take Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings alone, our 62,000 cabins is less than a quarter of just Orlando. Look at that. We're small. We're smaller than a quarter of Orlando, and you guys are worried about overcapacity. Come on, worry about something else, something real. That's not one to worry about. Go to the next one. Here's an example I was talking about the value proposition. These are real numbers. We didn't use a random numbers machine to come up with this. We shopped it. We shopped ourselves. We shopped a four-star resort in the Caribbean. We shopped a four-star Miami Beach hotel. 44% less, coincidentally, than a Norwegian cruise. One of the things I think the industry needs to do a better job of is harping on this, the value proposition. We do it through the deal.
It's not about price, it's about the deal, and I wish that others would focus more about the deal versus land than they have in the past. Go back a minute. What does this mean? It means we have a lot of headroom and opportunity to raise prices, the third bullet, versus land. You're gonna see in a minute. Well, you saw 2019. You're gonna see what we did in second quarter of 2022 in pricing. There's still a lot of headroom. As we bring on more ships like this, which are premium-priced, not just for Norwegian, but for Ocean and for Regent, our pricing is gonna continue to go up. The backdrop is that it should go up given the broader hospitality dynamics of the land vacations.
We talked a little bit about the strong leadership team. You know, Mano a Mano, we'll go up against anybody. I wouldn't trade my team for anybody out there. We've been together for a long time. When I go like this, like this, like this, Harry knows exactly what I mean. Howard sometimes will disagree, but he knows what I mean. We're a family. We started this cruise company, Oceania, back in 2002, literally at my kitchen table, and these guys were there. I'll go into any battle with them. We have. We've gone through battles. We started Oceania in 2003, and three months later, the Iraq War broke out, and then there was SARS, and there was the chicken flu, and all sorts of bad things happened. We survived, and we succeeded.
We succeeded the Great Recession, and we succeeded through all those, all those terrorist attacks that occurred throughout 2016, if you recall them. We're gonna. Not that we're going to beat the pandemic. We're beating the pandemic. Wait till you see, Mark's presentation. You've heard us in our last earnings call. Bookings for 2023 were in line with 2019 at the same point in time. In line means equal to slightly up, in case anybody's wondering. I wonder what within historical average means. Have you got anybody figured out what that means? Steve, have you figured that out yet? No? We're telling you what in line means, and at meaningfully higher prices. Significantly higher prices that we're gonna show you.
If you recall, for those of you who were involved in our business and involved with Norwegian, at the third quarter call in 2018, I said that we had reached the optimum booking curve in 2018 for 2019. If you book any faster, you're leaving money on the table. If you book any slower, you're either gonna have empty cabins, or you're gonna have to discount, which we never do. We've reached the optimum. I don't wanna sell any faster. Today, for us to be at or slightly above where we were in 2019 is exactly where we wanna be, at higher, meaningfully higher prices. This is a team that's doing it. We share the same passion. I wish we can show you our emails at 5 in the morning and at midnight. We're a family.
Like I said earlier, I wouldn't trade these guys and these gals for anyone in the industry. Very happy to have them. Let's go to the next. Sail & Sustain. This is not a slogan for us. This is not a check the box for us. This is not soup du jour. This is something that is integral part of our organization and everything we do. We're very proud of the S&G part. More than 50% of our management team is women. We have three women on our board of directors of eight. We have minorities of every kind, including me. I am not Swedish. Norwegian? I'm not Norwegian either. On the governance side, on the social side, as I said.
I'm fortunate that I was given an opportunity to run this wonderful company. I see it as my obligation to carry that torch and pass out that baton. On the environmental front, let's face it, we burn heavy fuel, and we've committed to decarbonize completely by 2050. We're gonna have to invest vast amounts of monies to be able to do that. We're gonna do whatever science allows us to do. We're hoping that biodiesel fuels come along. We're now looking at how we convert several of our new builds to methanol fuel, which we believe is the best chance of decarbonization based on the science we have today. It's not LNG. LNG is a stopgap. The best solution today is methanol. We're doing everything we can on that area.
To show you how much we mean this, we have tied our ESG metrics to our management compensation, our bonuses. If we don't do what we say we're gonna do, it's gonna hurt my pocket and everybody else's pocket. That's the best indication I could give you how seriously we take this. We got skin in the game. Jessica and her team are doing a great job of disclosure so that you and the investment community can see exactly what we're doing. Robin and his team are doing everything possible on the mechanic part of the vessels. How do we conserve fuel? How do we convert some of our fuel?
We have experiments going on with a fuel company of being able to use sustainable fuels, non-fossil fuels. Ladies and gentlemen, I just tell you, and the list is long, we're committed to this. It's not soup du jour. It's not the show of the day. It is an integral part of everything we do. The E, the S. The S, we've been doing for quite a while. I'm very proud of the diversity and the inclusion among our ranks. Of course, governance with the board, the senior management team. I've been here for a while. I'm gonna bring up Mark Kempa, our Chief Financial Officer, who is going to give you more food for thought. Thank you.
Well, good morning, everybody. Frank, I guess after nine years, it's good to hear I'm still considered a rookie. Maybe on year ten, I'll become a veteran. I don't know. Well, welcome, everybody. It's good to see everyone here. I see a lot of familiar faces. I see a lot of new faces. Thank you for joining us today on this wonderful ship. It really is spectacular. Fun fact. This, what you're sitting in today, the seats go back, and this turns into a pretty phenomenal nightclub, Las Vegas style. The chandelier comes down. I know there were some of you who were able to experience that in Europe, but it really is a phenomenal space. It just goes to show you how we've thought about changing the ship, changing the cruise experience, and utilizing all our spaces in the most effective way.
That's one of the reasons we talked about that Frank talked about why our onboard revenue was so strong from the onset of this of this ship sailing. In any case, let's get to, let's get to business. What are the positive catalysts for 2023? There's three main things. Improvement in public health and regulatory environment. Look, COVID is done. Consumers are done with COVID. Societies are done with COVID. Governments are. We've seen over the last, I guess 3-4 months, all areas of the world have basically eliminated all of their restrictions. Most recently, we just saw Canada. Greece, I think, has announced, I don't know if it's public yet, but it's this week is dropping all their protocols.
I think there might be one or two small areas of the world or spots in the world that there's protocols. The world is open again, and consumers wanna see the world. We've relaxed our protocols. We mentioned back in early August at our earnings call, we dropped all vaccination requirements for all of our ships. We immediately saw a significant boost in bookings, and that was, I believe, two or three days into it. I can tell you since then, we've seen a sustained level of solid bookings at the higher levels that we saw immediately after we dropped the vaccination requirements.
Most recently, if you saw this past Monday, the Norwegian brand, we actually dropped all requirements, meaning if you're unvaccinated or you choose not to show your vaccination status, you don't have to test anymore. That's across our Norwegian brand. Again, barriers are eliminating for the consumer, for the traveler to see the world, making it easier for all of our customers to enjoy our product. Consumer desire for travel experiences. Look, we all bought stuff during the pandemic. I think the one thing that the pandemic taught us all is we wanna continue to see the world. We wanna continue to experience life, not just stuff. We believe as a cruise brand, as a company, we are well-positioned to capture that. Just look at this ship. Just look at all the ships that we have in our fleet.
The tremendous value, the tremendous breadth of opportunities, experiences that you can gain on one of these ships as a traveler is amazing. Of course, our attractive new build pipeline. I think Frank mentioned it earlier, but if you look at our new build pipeline through 2027, that represents about a 50% capacity growth between now and then. If you just think about that and take that back to where we are today. We're not just focused on new ships growing for growing. We're focused on growing with new ships, driving more to the bottom line, but also generating more out of the bottom line from our existing fleet. You saw the numbers on Frank's slide where we grew capacity, we grew EBITDA, we grew operating cash flow. Growth, it's good growth.
If you think about that today, where we are, and you think about that from an earnings growth standpoint. She's gonna continue to excel, which we firmly believe, obviously. Our phased and disciplined voyage resumption. This has been a lightning rod in some sense, but we're very proud of this. We reentered service in Q3 of 2021 with 3 ships. Most recently, at the end of second quarter, we now have all of our ships in operation, 100% of our capacity. On the right-hand side, you see the sequential increase in capacity. Now, I wanna very clearly point out, our capacity at these levels was by design. We have said from day one, we are not in a rush to get back to full capacity.
If you go back six, eight months, we were doing it in a measured fashion because we wanted to protect the consumer. We wanted to make sure that we were giving the consumer the right product. We wanted to protect price, which I'll talk about in a little bit. You can see we sequentially ramp up 48 in Q1, 82. We've said low 80s for Q3. It's probably gonna be about 82% or 83%. Then as you look forward, we expect to be back at full historical operating capacity for the second quarter of 2023. Not in the second quarter, but for the second quarter of 2023. Booking trends update. I talked about that we saw an immediate uplift and extension in our bookings post the August announcement.
It's too early to say what's happened since Monday on the announcement of the further relaxation of our protocols, but I'm here to tell you, booking strength is solid. Demand is solid. We continue to garner price. It's demonstrated in our results for both the first quarter, second quarter, and you will see it's gonna demonstrate it in our third quarter results. Bookings are strong. Frank touched upon it, but our booking trends for FY 2023 continue to be, whether you wanna call it equal or in line, it's not historical average. In line has been interpreted that it could be this wide band from left to right. We're telling you that is equal to our 2019 record levels. But more importantly, pricing is significantly higher, and it's still that way today.
You'll get more color on our upcoming earnings call. The booking pace today is at a level that we need. The booking pace is at a level that will get us back to that historical capacity starting in the second quarter of next year and beyond. Those two factors are gonna really set a tremendous foundation for excelling at 2023. Something I wanna add, we recently heard one of our competitors talk about FCCs and the potential dilution to 2023. For us, we don't have that issue. We've clearly stated for probably the last 18 months or so that all of the future cruise credits or FCCs that we issued during the pandemic, they expire at the end of 2022. Doesn't mean a consumer can book on 12/31 and sail in 2023.
No, they have to book and sail by the end of 2022. For those remnant FCCs that may still be out there, we are simply going to refund the consumer. What does that mean? That means there is no yield drag to 2023 versus what some of our competitors may be seeing. We're targeting. I talked about pace. We've told you, I believe back in our 2018 or 2019 earnings call and subsequent events since, we believe our optimal position going into a calendar year is being at about 65% booked at the NCLH level. I'm here to tell you today we are on target to do that. That is a sweet spot. We don't leave too much money on the table.
We don't get too many bookings up front that don't allow us to take advantage of opportunities down the road. 65% in that zone is the optimal booking or target for us based on our booking curves, and we're pacing well to that, and we are gonna hit that at year-end. When you look at all three of those equations together, the book position, the pacing, the strong pricing power, we are very well set for 2023. The business is there. The proof is in the pudding. The business is on the books. Pricing, it's all about pricing. You can see our second quarter, this is total net revenue per diem. Not gross revenue, net revenue. 11% over 2019.
You look at our two peers, blended, you can call it flat, slightly up, slightly down, whatever way you wanna cut it. If you take that same statistic and you look at the first half of 2022, that 11% on a blended rate for the first half is 18%. Our go-to-market strategy is working. Our disciplined ramp-up back to the market is working. We're protecting price. We've said over and over, we believe this product is undervalued vis-a-vis our true competition, i.e., land resorts. We're gonna continue to push on price. We're gonna continue to spend marketing to make sure we're getting pricing power because this is an opportunity for the industry.
This is an opportunity for the industry to change the paradigm, to change the level of pricing that the consumer is getting for this phenomenal value, and we're gonna stick to that. The proof is in the pudding. It's right there. If you think about third quarter, we've talked about that in our earnings release, that third quarter, we believe pricing on a gross basis is gonna be up about mid-single to single high digits, and that would translate obviously to low single digits on a net basis. Keep in mind, we are rolling over a summer of 2019 versus 2023, where we don't have the Baltic as a result of the Ukraine-Russia conflict. That is a big headwind. Despite that, we are gaining significant pricing power. Financial update and outlook. Love that picture.
I think it's important to set the stage to see how we as a company have done through prior economic cycles. You can see this chart goes back all the way to 2008, and what it does is it highlights our trailing twelve-month EBITDA. If you look at that across the various cycles, whether it's the Great Recession, the major geopolitical events in 2016 and 2017, we have continued to grow EBITDA in this company and related margin, culminating to $1.9 billion at the end of 2023 or end of 2019. This business has proven time and time again, this industry, that no matter what event in the world, whether it's geopolitical, economic cycles or anything of the like, this industry bounces back, and it does so quickly. Just think about it.
This time last year, the industry was just restarting after being shut down for 500 days, and look what we're doing already as a whole. More particularly us as a company. We are operating. We're here. We're back. What are our key financial recovery milestones? At various conferences, whenever I speak to any of you and equity analysts, the one thing I always want you guys to take away is that our reputation is number one. We want a consistency which builds confidence. What we tell you is what we're gonna hit. We tend to be a conservative management team, but we are not a group that dangles the carrot and says, "Oh yeah, we might hit this number," and then we underperform. We wanna build confidence, and we're hitting our milestones.
You can see it started with positive contribution from the fleet in Q3 of last year. We reached positive operating cash flow in March of this year. Positive operating cash flow for the second quarter, the first quarter since the pandemic started. We expect to achieve positive EBITDA for the second half of 2022, as we outlined in our earnings call. The next big milestone is we expect to generate adjusted free cash flow for the fourth quarter. Again, we are rebuilding this business, but these are milestones we're gonna hit, we intend to hit, and that we're on track to hit. All of that is gonna result in historical load factors for 2023. Record yields and record EBITDA for 2023 based on everything we see today.
We are extremely well-positioned going into 2023, and we're finishing out 2022 strong. We are in a great position to continue to hit our milestones. Debt maturity profile. We've seen, you know, when we look at the two competitors, that there's been some refinancings lately. But I wanna tell you, during the pandemic, we were pretty methodical. We were pretty deliberate in terms of when we were raising debt, how we were raising debt. We were very cognizant of the debt maturity towers of how that was gonna come to play in the future. That's what this represents.
If you look at 2023, 2024, and 2025, we have, call it plus or minus about $1 billion-$1.5 billion of maturities, which is a pretty clean debt tower, allowing us to rebuild as we come out of the recovery. Now, you can see in 2024, you'll see $1.5 billion. That's our normal amortization. We are gonna be in the marketplace later this year. I think I've communicated this many times. Our operating facilities, our revolver, and term loan A will become current in January 2023. They mature in January 2024, but from a balance sheet perspective, they become current in January 2023. We are in discussions. You will see us in the marketplace this quarter to amend and extend those facilities.
I've said this time and again, based on everything we've seen with all of our relationships and the banks and all of our partners, we don't anticipate that there's gonna be any material change to those terms. Again, because it's gonna be a short extension, amend and extend. Beyond that, we have a relatively clean tower leading up to, as we continue to generate cash flow and leading up into 2026. Another phenomenal fact, pro forma for the Prima delivery, our fixed debt, 75% of our debt is fixed, and that's at a weighted average cost of debt of about 5%. Fast-forward to the end of 2023, that 75% goes to 80%. In a rising rate environment, again, we are well-positioned from an interest and debt standpoint, given our overall cost of debt. Liquidity. Liquidity, liquidity.
We're ending the quarter, it's very prelim, of course, but we believe we're ending the quarter at about $2.2 billion of liquidity. That consists of about $1.2 billion of cash, plus the $1 billion backstop facility that we have. If you go back to the second quarter, our liquidity was $2.9 billion. Yes, we did have a decrease in liquidity. It's expected. If you think about what we've said at our milestones, we expect that we're gonna generate adjusted positive free cash flow in the fourth quarter. We wouldn't expect that we're going to generate incremental cash until that point. What I'm here to tell you is that we are right on plan. In fact, I believe we're actually doing better than our plan.
We ended the quarter with $2.2 billion. As of today, we currently have about $500 million of available debt capacity should we need, and that is in addition to the $1 billion backstop that we have in place today. I talked about the amend and extend that we're looking to do within this quarter. As part of that, we are, as another backstop, discussing with our lenders about increasing our available debt basket capacity. Not that we have intention to use any of it, but we wanna have the flexibility should there be some worldwide significant event that impacts the industry. We will always wanna have the flexibility.
Based on our outlook, and most importantly, I wanna reiterate this, we believe we can fund our operations based on our existing cash and our organic cash flow that we see as we look at our models. I'm here to tell you, I've told people this before, our board of directors, our management team has zero appetite to issue equity, to reduce debt, or to delever. When you look at the cash this business spins off and you go back and you look at 2019 and prior, we were spinning off about $1.5 billion a year, plus or minus. This business produces cash, and it's starting to ramp up. We believe we have sufficient liquidity and sufficient cash on hand to fund our operations. Why do we have confidence in that? Well, this is it. The advanced ticket sales.
That is the cash engine. That's the cash flywheel that funds this business. It's essentially free money. If you think about it, a consumer is making their final payment on average, 120-150 days prior to sailing. That cash adds up. That's what funds this business. If you look at what our advance ticket sales balance did, obviously it was healthy in 2018. The pandemic, we had the all-time low, and then look what happened in Q2. We hit a record high of $2.5 billion. $2.5 billion. We were down to about $1 billion in 2020, of which, if I recall, about $800 million of that were future cruise credits.
If you look at the book, which is the true cash coming in the door, irregardless of what's being re-recognized from a revenue standpoint, look what's happened on the right-hand side. Cash. This is true cash coming in the door. It increased 42% to almost $1.5 billion during the second quarter. Again, demonstrating that cash is coming in the door, this is why we're confident as we look at our models and we look at our outlook, we have sufficient cash to fund our operations. This says it all, and the demand is still there. Again, I touched on this earlier, meaning growth potential, meaningful growth potential. If you look at 2019, our capacity was about 19.2 million days, and you look at where we are today based on what we know for 2023.
From 2019 to 2023, we had some ships that we took delivery of in late 2019 that we really didn't get the benefit of, Norwegian Encore. Then at the start of the pandemic, we delivered Seven Seas Splendor for the Regent brand. Then in between that, we just took delivery of this wonderful ship, and we're going to take delivery of Viva next year, Vista next year, and Seven Seas Grandeur. If you look at the growth on an annualized basis from 2019, we're growing our capacity at 23%. That's going to translate into outsized earning potential. When we sit here and say today we expect to generate record yields next year and record EBITDA, that's part of the reason why.
That's with the headwinds that we're seeing today in some of the inflation, the cost pressures. We are well-positioned to capture this growth. I go back to the beginning. If you invest in this company today and you believe in this industry, there is significant potential as you look in years 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in terms of the growth opportunities. Then of course, if you fast-track that down to 2027, that's almost a 50% growth in capacity. That's new ships. Keep in mind, we don't forget about the old fleet, and it's not an old fleet. We have the youngest fleet in the North American operators. We continue to invest. We continue to take the ideas that work on our newer ships. We retrofit some of our older fleet so that we're harmonizing.
We're having a consistent product across our fleet. That's what generates the bottom line. Financing. Frank touched on this. Norwegian Prima, fixed-rate financing, 2.7%, 12-year amortization. It starts the day you take delivery of the ship. Fast-forward, we look at our next ship, Oceania Vista, 3.6%, Viva, 2.8%. I mean, you guys can read the numbers. I don't need to read the numbers. But all of these rates are fixed. There is zero opportunity for any of the export credit agencies or banks to renegotiate the rates. They are fixed. They can't change. These are rates for ships that are not even being delivered that are being delivered over the next 5 years.
When you look at the low fixed-rate financing, we've talked about the mechanics of some of our new builds, where we always expect when we build a new ship, we expect a five-year cash-on-cash payback. That's part of the reason. That's free money. That's free money in today's environment, and it's government-backed, low rate. If you guys were in our shoes, yes, given our size, given our fleet of 29 ships, we need more ships. You want us to have more ships because that's going to help drive the growth story.
I don't want to get into details on this slide, but I think one of the things that people tend to overlook with our new building program is everybody says, "Well, Mark, you're building ships, but you have a huge equity or cash outlay ahead of the ship." Well, that's partially true, depending on how we structure the financing, because some of the financing supports some of our pre-delivery payments, which by the way, generally what happens is you sign a contract for the ship. We never contract a ship without fixed financing in place. There's generally 4 installments that occur prior to the ship delivery. Timing could be anywhere from 24, 18 months, 12 months, 6 months. Then you have the big lump sum delivery of 80% at ship vessel delivery.
The thing that people overlook is that prior to the ship ever entering service or us taking delivery of it, keep in mind, I talked about the advanced ticket sales. That cash flywheel starts churning about 180 days or longer before we ever even take ownership of the ship. That generally results in about $100 million-$150 million of permanent incremental cash infusion to the business. While we are making some progress payments ahead of the ship delivery, some of that is already financed, so it's not true cash out of the system. We are getting cash in our system before we even sail. When you look at it on a holistic basis, it's not a huge drag on the numbers.
It's really a magical formula if you think about it, but I think people tend to overlook that when they're looking at their models and they're looking at the cash generation of the business going forward. That's something that we wanted to point out for the audience. What's our medium and long-term financial recovery? I've said this before. It's really three pillars. We're going to focus on rebuilding and improving our margins. I've been asked a lot, you know, can this business bounce back? Is this business still capable of generating 30%+ margin, EBITDA margin? The resounding answer is yes. Everything we see indicates whether it's record pricing, our cost structure, our scale, this business will return to historical margin levels. That's not to say that we don't have near-term pressures today.
We all do. I mean, we all go to the grocery store. We all have to fill our car with a tank of gas. There is near-term pressures, but the good thing is we're starting to see significant decreases in commodity prices, fuel prices. We're starting to right-size our business. As our load factors get back to historical levels in the second quarter, that's going to help us. Absolutely, we see this business going back to generating 30%+ margin without a doubt. I wanna make sure that is very clear. We're focused on maximizing cash flow generation. I talked about it through our advanced ticket sales, through the new ships. The numbers don't lie, folks.
You look at second quarter, the cash that came in 40% higher, $1.5 billion, it continues to come in. The customer is back. Then of course, optimizing our balance sheet. Look, we've made some hard decisions during the pandemic. We had to, just like everybody else. Unfortunately, we had to float more shares out in the marketplace. We took on additional debt. We as a management team, we as a company, we've been here before. We know how to do this. We've taken this company from, I think it was 12x or 13 x levered in 2008, 2009, to where we ended 2020 or 2019, I'll show you shortly, in the low threes, and we are planning to be in the twos. The point is, we know how to do it.
This management team, our board is squarely focused on de-levering and de-risking this company. We're not gonna do it by issuing equity. It's gonna come from good old-fashioned organic cash flow, good old-fashioned earnings, plus the significant growth that we have coming online. We have every confidence in that. This is what I'm talking about. This only goes back to 2014, but you can see in 2014, we were almost 7x levered. By 2017, we were already in the 3x. We ended 2019 at 3.2. It was 3.4, but we had taken delivery of a ship at the very end of the end of the year, 3x.
We were expected, and we were signaling to the marketplace that we were gonna be in the 2x handle in 2020 prior to the pandemic. We did that on the back of also returning $1 billion to shareholders over the course of that. That goes to demonstrate not only the cash potential that this business has and the cash that it generates. That's proof in the pudding. We, as this management team, we know how to do this. We've done it before. It's in our DNA. We will de-lever this company. I didn't wanna put this in writing, but I've told several of you, our goal.
You know, if you look at where we are today, depending on how you look at our leverage, you know, and if you look at the estimates for next year, you know, one could say we're probably in the 6x area of leverage today or early next year. Based on everything we see and what we're targeting as a management team and as a company, we wanna turn 2023 with leverage of a 5x handle, in 2024, a 4x handle, and in 2025, a 3x handle. Not easy, not guaranteed, but where we see the business, we think there is real potential to do that, and that's what we are squarely focused on as a management team. We're focusing all our efforts around that because we know we have to de-lever the company.
We wanna de-risk the stock, and that is our number one priority. Again, we're not gonna do that issuing equity. Here to tell you that today. We've done it before. We know how to do it. We're on track. 2023 is looking great. Business demand is strong, pricing is strong. We have a great setup. That combined with our growth potential, the future looks bright for us. With that, I'll turn it back over to Frank for some key takeaways before we go and do a Q&A.
Great job. When we started this morning, I asked you all to focus on the handful of bullet points that we want you to remember after today. The first one is, not all cruise operators are created equal. What happens to Carnival isn't gonna happen to us. Many of you believe that, and you believed it for years. Geez, if the biggest operator has these issues, the number three guy certainly will succumb to the same fate sooner or later. Hasn't happened in the past, certainly isn't gonna happen in the future. It's a completely different business. Don't believe it. I think between Mark and I, we've demonstrated to you through facts, through numbers, through trends, that we have specific drivers that makes our investment thesis very different than others in our space. I hope you take that to heart.
We've been clear and consistent in our strategy. We've delivered what we said we're gonna deliver. We're not trying to window dress. This is not about optics. This is not a race. We manage the business for the long term. Others might have higher occupancies than us early on. Great. Look at their pricing. Pricing lingers. After a sailing ends, whether it's full or empty, no one knows, no one cares. It happened. Pricing lingers. Pricing has a tail. If you charge $100 for this cruise today, don't expect to charge $300 for the same cruise tomorrow. Doesn't work that way. What we have seen time and time again, those who discount take forever. I mean forever because some cruise companies have yet to return to their pre-Great Recession pricing.
Our three brands took less than 3 years to do so. Great Recession pricing. You know, everything we showed you demonstrate that there is a healthy consumer out there, at least the ones that we target. We don't target those making less than $50,000. Just yesterday, one of our major banking partners, who's also one of the country's largest credit card operators, told us the following. What they're seeing is those who have household incomes of less than $50,000 are seeing a major drop in their purchasing of hospitality-related expenditures. We don't fish in that pond. Between $50,000 and $100,000 in household income, annual household income, slightly down. Maybe around the edges we fish in that pond, not at the $50,000 level, but closer to the $90,000, $100,000 level.
Those who make more than $100,000, and you saw that certainly, coalesces with the net worth that we showed you, volumes of $250+, hospitality spending is actually slightly up. We're confident based on what we're seeing, the numbers that we have on our books today, our marketing strategy, that healthy consumer is gonna continue. The labor markets are still strong. Wages are up. Is there going to be an economic slowdown? There might be, but my sense is that if there is one, it will be more in the business world than in the consumer world. As you know, the U.S. economy, two-thirds of it is run by consumers.
As long as people have jobs and they're making good money, they're gonna spend, and they're gonna spend on vacation, and we're gonna be there to take it. The value proposition comes in because if there is a little bit of fragility around the edges, value becomes more important than ever, and you saw the value proposition of a cruise versus land. It's all about, at the end of the day, cash, right? We do all this to generate cash. Cash is king. I'm not gonna belabor the point. I think Mark did an excellent job of communicating to you where our cash position is, and what we expect to generate to delever the company, fund operations without having the need to raise any kind of capital. We're confident of that. We've been up here a long time.
I think we're over by half an hour, but we wanna give you plenty of time, and those who are live streaming to ask questions. We are gonna ask or answer some questions from those from the SAY platform. We've got 45 minutes of that, and we're gonna open up the audience for questions. Thank you very much for listening.
All right. Thank you, Frank. All right. To kick off our Q&A, we actually have partnered with Say Technologies for the first time with this event to open up a new shareholder Q&A platform, which allows all of our shareholders to submit and upvote questions to management. We chose to use this platform because we wanted to make sure that all of our shareholders, large or small, have a voice and are engaged with us. We're gonna start off today by addressing the top-ranked questions that came in through the platform, and then we will kick it all off to the audience here. Okay, the first one here, the top-ranked question here was, what are the major revenue obstacles your data shows right now? Is it COVID, the economy, or any other reason?
I think Frank is probably the best one to answer this one for us.
Hello, whoever asked those questions. Thank you for those questions. It's not COVID. COVID is over. President Biden said so. Look, it's over. Look what the CDC has done over the last couple of weeks. Not that the CDC is the. You know where I'm going with that. Last week, if you go to the hospital, you don't have to wear a mask. That's about as telltale a sign that it's over. The short answer is it's not COVID. You just heard my comments about the economy. Yeah, there are strains around the edges so far. The economy, the inflation is hitting those in the lower income categories harder than those who are higher. Thank God for us, our strategy is that quality customer, that more upscale customer.
It melds with our strategy of having each of the brands at the top tier of each of those categories. You know, I'm the CEO of the company. I worry about everything. It's my job to worry about everything. I'm not any more worried today than I normally am about the revenue generation capacity of this company. The numbers suggest so. We're hoping for the best, obviously, but we're prepared for the worst. We know how to market during good times. We know how to market during bad times. We think our product supports a higher price. We're getting it.
Great.
Yeah.
All right. Thank you, Frank. Our second question here is, what are your financial plans for 2023 to pay off some expiring debt or any more share sales planned? Just in case you didn't hear it 3 x, Mark already told you. He'll tell you again.
Look, you know, when we talk about, I guess, you know, expiring debt, I guess that's maturing debt. We talked about that in our maturity tower. We have a pretty clean maturity tower next year, about $1 billion, and we're generating. The cash engine has already started. You know, as I said, if I didn't say it clearly, we do not plan to issue any more equity to raise capital. We don't think we need to do anything. We think given the trajectory of the business, our cash is more than sufficient. Cash on hand, plus the cash that we expect, not only to fund the business, but to support the $1 billion or so that we have coming maturity maturing next year.
This is actually not something we're significantly worried about. I talked about the confidence of why that is. It's because of the advanced ticket sales. That engine is revving, that flywheel is going, and we continue to see it accelerating. It's full steam ahead for us, and it's just gonna improve as we get back to historical load factors in Q2.
To be clear, we don't always comment on our capital market activities. Given the current volatility, we are just doing this one time because we feel like it's appropriate, to reassure and to give you guys a little bit more confidence. Don't ask us every quarter. Okay.
Because our counsels here, you know?
Yeah.
We blame it on them.
All right, now we can take some questions from the audience. Let's start with Vince over here. Right in front.
Thank you. Question for you, Frank. I remember years ago when you guys were talking about your capacity expansion plans. It involved building out more sourcing on the West Coast, looking more into Canada and growing in China. When you look at the capacity that you have arriving now, it's substantial. You've provided that sourcing chart up there for guests by region. Can you talk a little bit about your plan to grow sourcing and how you think you're gonna fill these ships, and in which markets you think are most primed for additions?
Yeah. Well, it won't be China. I'm glad we left China when we did, and that's a whole different story. Like I said earlier in my remarks, we've always been a U.S.-centric business. We have diversified to the point where today we're roughly 80/20. I think if you ask our brand presidents where they'd like to be, they'd probably be more 75/25. We probably won't be pushing that 75/25 balance today given what's going on around the world. Typically, Europe as a whole is our second-largest source market after North America, which includes Canada. So we've grown our Canadian business well. I think we've grown our U.S. business as well, both in absolute terms and in relative terms.
You know, we now have the infrastructure in place that if we need to flex more business out of the U.K., out of Europe, out of Australia, which is a very nice market for us. I think Australia is number three after U.S., Canada. Australia is number three. We now even have a presence in South America we can flex. Let me be clear, if possible, I'll take an American customer any day over anybody else.
Just to put some more end caps around that. If you think about it, we only carry about 3 million or so passengers a year between our three brands. I think Frank said this earlier, something we can't overlook. This industry in 2019, only 30 million people cruised worldwide. Frank talked about if you look at the penetration in terms of the overall demographics that have the ability to travel and then where we're positioned within that, there's tremendous opportunity from all different source markets. We're barely scratching the surface.
Yeah.
Hi. Thank you. Mark, two questions. Christopher Stathoulopoulos, Susquehanna Financial Group. Just could you give a little bit more detail on the cash flow bridge from June to September? I think that was a little bit more than a half a billion decline. Two, any color on your exit rate for unit costs this year in areas that you feel are stickier or harder to work off as you work into 2023. Thank you.
Certainly. If I think I heard it correctly, it was the cash burn from Q2 to Q3, and then in terms of costs that are improving over the back half of the year?
Yes.
Yeah. Look, you know, as I tried to communicate before, you know, our cash burn from Q2 to Q3. It was, you know, about $700 million or so on a net basis, 29-22. That was expected. Again, you know, if you look at where we are, we did have debt that was amortizing in the normal course over the course of the third quarter. If you think about where we're going, we have said that we expect to turn adjusted free cash flow positive in Q4. At that point, that's when we expect to start building cash. Not unexpected, not surprising. It was actually slightly better than we thought it was going to be going from Q2 to Q3.
Again, the trends are improving. Until we hit that adjusted free cash flow metric in the fourth quarter of this year, you will see a slight decline in cash. In terms of the cost structure, look, you know, we're working, you know, hard everywhere we can. You know, it's, you know, our number one focus was to get the business back, get it going. Did we probably overspend purposely that when customers came on board, they were getting the best product possible? Yeah, I think generally we did, but that was by design because we wanted this industry, we wanted our company to come back with a splash.
Now, there's still inflationary pressures out there, but when you look at proteins and you look at vegetables and consumables, I just got some charts from our supply chain group two days ago. Things are starting to go down, and they're starting to get back into their five-year average. We're gonna take advantage of that. It's not gonna happen overnight. When you look at our costs, you have to keep in mind that this is a fixed cost business. Our capacity days, so when you look at it on a unit cost basis, our capacity days are not fully ramped up yet. As you look at the unit cost between third, fourth, and first quarter, it's going to be improving.
There is a little bit of a hurdle there just by the mere fact that we're not operating at full loads. Some of the costs you just can't get rid of, you know, you can't get the scale out of it. Costs are improving. We're focused on it. We're also focused on the top line, but again, it takes a certain investment to get the per diems that we want, and we'll continue to be smart about it.
James.
Good morning. James Hardiman at Citi. Thanks for having us on board. I really appreciate it. A lot of discussion about pricing today. I guess I struggle a little bit connecting the dots between what's been reported in terms of your peak per diems and how we should think about next year. Obviously, pricing is up significantly next year. It seems like there's a lot of puts and takes with what's been reported versus how we think about next year. Maybe connect the dots, give us some of the puts and takes. One of your peers, who will remain nameless, but was in the red in the presentation.
Mm-hmm.
Had significant declines that they reported, and yet they're still talking about significant growth as we look to next year. Your strategy has obviously been different than theirs. Just versus where you've reported, should we think about pricing next year being similar, better, worse? Obviously there are some moving parts there. Thanks.
Go ahead, and I'll follow up.
Look, I think, you know, I think we were pretty clear. You know, first of all, you look at our second quarter results, up 11%. I think if you look at our earnings call commentary in the second quarter, we had given a what we said clearly was going to be a one-time fact that our revenue on the books was up 40%. Some of that was, you know, related to our 20+% capacity increase for next year. But we also said pricing was up 20%. Now, we did say that that will level off because it naturally will level off. But I also said pricing was significantly up for next year at the same load factors that we saw in record 2019.
Everything we're seeing from our customer base, and I think that's important to hit on. Our customer base is not the same as one of our peers in the red group or some of our peers in the blue group. Our customer base across our three brands tends to be a higher level customer. They're not immune to economic cycles. They're more insulated. They're more resilient. Frank gave some stats on one of the largest banks that we just got in terms of credit card processing the other day. Our customers are there. They're booking. They're paying. It's about the deal. It's not just about the $9.99 cruise. It's about everything you're getting. Consumers are willing to pay if they feel that they're getting value and a deal.
Again, all that goes on the back of our go-to-market strategy. This is a huge opportunity for the industry to change the pricing dynamics. The industry has never been stopped like this. Let's take that jump. Let's reset the index on pricing for this severely undervalued product, vis-a-vis our land-based competitors, and get the consumer and the broader community used to higher pricing. We're all seeing it across the board. Why shouldn't we participate? It takes marketing to do that. I said somewhere a few minutes ago, only 30 million people worldwide cruised. If you think about that worldwide, we have to continue to educate. We have to continue to bring this value proposition to the marketplace, U.S., Canada, Europe, worldwide. We're gonna spend to do that. We're seeing it in our 2023 trends. Turn it over to you.
No. Not much to add to that. Look, yield growth is one thing, and we're telling you squarely our 2023 yields will be the best ever. Better than 2019, better than what 2020 was going to be before the pandemic. Also look at the absolute number. In Q2, $277 per person per day net revenue. 2019, $154 using the same math, 80% higher. What does that tell you? We've got a different customer. We've got a different business, 80% higher. I went through great lengths to show you why at $277, we still have a lot of headroom to grow. Mark just mentioned it, the gap between us and alternative vacations to cruising. Everybody talks about, "Oh, we need to close the gap." We're the ones closing the gap.
$277 a day, 80% better than the red, 38% better than the blue. Pretty good.
Robin Farley with UBS. Clearly your 2023 cumulative book position, very solid. It seems like the last six weeks would be incrementally even better, right? In other words, since the protocols have been dropped, that the run rate is even better than what your cumulative 2023 position is in terms of price and load build. Can you give us any insight into kind of how much stronger the last six weeks is, rather than, you know, 'cause cumulative includes bookings from obviously months ago when there were more restrictions, just to get a sense of that run rate for demand. Thanks.
Hi, Robin. Look, if I look back at the last six weeks, what sticks out to me is how much business came on for 2022. 2023 is marching along the way it's marching along. Our marketing machine is focused on 2023 forward. That kept the party going on 2023. The surprise to me was, without much marketing for 2022 started booking a lot better in late Q3 and Q4. Look, these are all steps towards getting back to full normalcy, okay? We think we've taken the lead on these steps. We were the first cruise company to eliminate to allow unvaccinated to come online. Monday, we announced that the Norwegian brand, no protocols. Every day, every week, more destinations open their doors to cruising.
I think we're down now to, if I remember correctly, the Comoros, Nicaragua, China, and Japan. Out of those four, I only want Japan. We need Japan, quite frankly. We have quite a bit of business in Q1, early Q2. Japan, we're talking to Japan. The whole industry is, and we think that's gonna happen. These are all data points that you string along. You hear the commentary from our peers, from ourselves. It's happening, Robin. It's happening. Perhaps the broader community doesn't understand what it took to bring the companies back to life. You know, we weren't shut down for a week or two like hotels were or restaurants were or, you know, airlines were, never shut down. 500 days, everything went dark.
To bring it back up, not just the operations, that's sort of the easy part, but to go from zero to a hundred miles an hour like we need to be to fill the vessels on a consistent basis, short-term, mid-term, long-term, it's a yeoman's job against the backdrop of, you know, COVID still in the background and then, you know, someone started talking about recession and it's happening. It's happening. It's too early to talk about 2024, but 2024 is better booked than it's ever been this far out. Unless something changes in that trajectory, all the steps, all the building blocks are there to have a wonderful 2023. Put this whole two years behind us.
Great. Let's go from here.
Great. Thanks for that, Frank. It's not lost on us on the mammoth lift you guys have gone through over the last 12 months. Brandt Montour from Barclays, and thanks for doing this, and obviously a gorgeous ship. First question for Mark. The 2023, 2024, 2025 net leverage targets that you commented, I wanna clarify, that's a handle, not a dot zero sort of target? And then that's part one of the first question. Part two is, do you need to run net yield growth at a higher CAGR versus your pre-COVID run rate to get to those targets?
Yeah. Thanks, Brandt. Glad you enjoyed the ship so far. I would love it to be at a 5.0 handle, but I just don't think that's realistic. Hence why I said 5.x. Look, the point is we're trying to get into the 5s. Is it gonna be, will it be on the high side of the 5s? Yes. I think that's a realistic target. And same thing when you look at 4 and 3 beyond. But we're gonna work our tail off to do better than that, and if we can. When we look at our historical yield growth, our historical cost growth, when we talk about our targets, we're not talking about a blue sky every day.
You know, blue sky every day for the next three years type of scenario that has to happen. The normal course of business just has to happen. We just have to be able to continue to operate. Traditionally, we've grown yield anywhere from about 3%-5%, sometimes higher. The cost generally, if you look at it on a CAGR basis, it's probably gonna be somewhere, you know, around 3%-3.5% from 2019 on a CAGR basis. You put all that together, it just naturally generates the EBITDA and earnings expectations that I think we're expecting for next year and beyond. There's no magic potion that we need to happen. We just need to be able to operate in a stable environment at our normal cadence. Now, we don't settle for our normal cadence.
You guys know that. We tend to be very conservative. I said that when I first walked up, that we wanna build consistency, we wanna build confidence in our investor base and all of our stakeholders. What we tell you.
Our targets that we think we can reasonably hit in a normal environment. It doesn't have to be a blue sky day every day.
Well, you know one of the big drivers is that capacity that's coming online. You saw the chart of what we've actually done from 2015 to 2019, capacity CAGR of 7%, revenue CAGR of 11%, EBITDA CAGR of 13%, cash flow CAGR of 15%. We overperformed. I can't wait to get my hands on these 8 other ships coming because they are gonna be more premium, more capacity growth than what we saw in 2015 to 2019. It all boils down to this in my view. Do you believe that we can fill the new ships coming online at the kind of premium yields that we've demonstrated in the past? If you don't think we can, run for the hills.
If you think we can because we have the know-how, the machinery, the strategic vision to do it, then this is gonna be one heck of a cash-generating machine, an EBITDA-generating machine, a net income-generating machine.
It's hard to bet against you, Frank. If I may also, Cuba, do you think that that's a near-term catalyst in terms of reopening? If so, would you go in differently than you went in last time?
I don't think Cuba will open up anytime soon. I stay close to it in many ways. As you know, I happen to be Cuban, so I have a vested interest, not just because I run a cruise company, because that's where I was born. I don't think it's gonna happen in 2023. I don't think it happens in 2024. The administrations, there's back-channel conversations. U.S. just opened up the embassy in Havana after Trump closed it down. Look, we're hoping that it reopens. If it does reopen, I think we will do exactly what we did last time. It was very successful. You know, you saw those numbers for 2019. 2019 was hampered $100 million.
We lost $100 million when Trump ordered us out of Cuba with, I think, 14 hours' notice. $100 million. 2019 would have been $100 million better net income, EBITDA, everything. I guess 50 cents a share, right? If it wasn't for Cuba. We'd love to have it, but I don't. It's not included in our calculations that you saw today.
Maybe Patrick. Go ahead first. You can go first.
Thanks so much. Paul Golding from Macquarie, and thanks so much for having us on. I'll echo the sentiment, beautiful ship. I wanted to ask about Wave season and how you're thinking about Wave in the context of this year and versus how you thought about it in 2019. Also, I think you gave a 65% goal for booked volume at the end of 2022 for 2023. Just like to see if there's some color you could give around marketing in that context, and whether you see a smoother curve throughout the booking seasons, relative to how booked you are and the demand that you're seeing, and relative to Wave. Thanks.
Yeah. Look, we're not gonna do anything extraordinary, anything different than what you've seen us do over the past, few quarters to get to that 65% and at record prices. Let's not always talk about load and pricing in the same sentence. The easiest thing in the world is to fill a ship, you know? At $10 a day, I can fill the ships like that. Those two variables have got to go together, else it's not a complete picture. Our three brands are continuing to work to get to that 65% by year-end. By the way, a couple of the brands are already way past 65% for next year. In terms of the Wave season, I think Wave is gonna be really good. We didn't have one in
Well, the 2020 Wave got cut short, right? 'Cause we all ended the party on March 10th, and the Wave was still going. We didn't have one in 2021. We really didn't have one in 2022. I think it's gonna be big. I know that our three brands are planning big marketing pushes to generate as much business as we can during Wave. That'll be another touch point is Wave back. If we have a strong Wave, that's another check the box that we're that much closer to being normal.
Great. Let's go here, and then Patrick in the middle here. Let's start over there. Yep.
Hi. Thank you so much. My name is Priya Rangarajan with RBC. A couple of questions. Just going with the advertising, should we expect 2023 advertising per ALBD to be comparable to 2019? Secondly, can you comment on the new-to-cruise segment? Are you seeing any different trends from what you've seen in 2019? Thank you.
I got the second part.
Marketing at the same levels as 2019, and is there any change in new to cruise?
Okay. No, we're spending more in 2022 to fill 2023 than we spent in 2019 to fill 2020 or in 2018 to fill 2019 for a couple reasons. One, we have more ships to fill, but on a unit basis, slightly higher because we had to bring the economy back. Not the economy, we had to bring back our cruisers. Now, you might say, "But wait a minute. You've heard me talk about pent-up demand. If there's so much pent-up demand, why are you having to spend marketing dollars?" Well, part of it is more capacity. Part of it is I'm having to fight peers who are giving away their product, and I have to market to our target market to make sure that they book with us at prices that are 80% higher.
We don't think that will last forever. Our budget for 2023 marketing is substantially below what we are spending in 2022. Please don't underestimate what it took to restart this business from zero to where we need to be to fill the vessels consistently. The way we do it, which we think is the optimum way, is through marketing spend. I think if you see the result of the top line that we generate in yields and in pricing and total net revenue, the cash generation that Mark showed in the second quarter went up 40% from the previous quarter. That's all because we market to fill, we don't discount to fill, and we generate the top customer. The second question had to do with.
New to cruise.
New to cruise.
Yep.
It hasn't changed a whole lot. We showed you statistics this morning that showed that a Norwegian brand, 45% of the guests are repeaters. It's 50% at Oceania, 55% at Regent. That has been historically the numbers, give or take a point. We continue to generate leads. We showed you how our direct business is growing, our direct web business is growing. More and more digital marketing, which is cheaper by the unit, by the way. Casting a wider net, trying to find those high-end consumers. We don't expect major shifts in the type of customer, whether they're past guests to the brand, new to the brand, or outright new to cruising.
Great. Patrick?
Thank you. Patrick Scholes at Truist Securities. Frank, you certainly laid out some very compelling reasons why all cruise brands and cruise companies are not created equal. As an analyst, I certainly follow other travel companies such as hotels and vacation ownership. With those industries and the stocks, we definitely see a correlation between premium valuation multiples attached to premium brands and higher level customers. However, for the cruise industry or the cruise stocks, historically, you folks have traded at a discount to-
This plus the Oceania and the Regent brands. I think we have to dispel that. I think that there's bigger monies to be made in this stock, in this company than there is in our competitors. When you already operate the number of vessels that our competitors operate, how do you really grow? You know, you're competing against yourself most of the time. You're having to discount to fill. I've got a lot of headroom. I've got headroom for more capacity. I've got headroom to raise prices. We know how to raise prices, Patrick. $277 a day versus $154. That's huge. Huge. You really think that $124 margin difference between us and brand X can't be made up with lower cost because they're bigger. Can't. You can't.
I can beat you in revenue by $124. I proved it to you. You can't beat me or nobody can beat us in reducing your cost by $124. It's impossible. We're gonna have better margins. These kinds of vessels, I mean, I can't tell you how bubbly we all are. We got our report this morning. I was having coffee with Ross, who runs onboard revenue, and he just had a smile from here to here that we generated on the transatlantic on this vessel, onboard revenue that's more than double what any other ship has done. I don't think that was. There wasn't big spenders on board. They were just regular people.
This kind of vessel and the vessels that are coming behind it have that kind of magnet to draw out a quality customer who's willing to spend money on board.
Patrick, just to add a couple comments. You know, we've often heard, you know, historically, everybody's worried about capacity growth, and we touched on it today. Capacity growth is not an issue. You look at the size of the available market, there's a huge opportunity. So we need you and your cohorts to buy into that. It's real. You know, we've talked about capacity concerns since 2015. Every year, not only our company, but the entire industry, has completely debunked that because we've grown earnings, we've grown revenue. I mean, the proof is in the pudding. You know, you think about our size of our fleet. It's 29 ships. So if you break...
If you break that down, it sounds like a lot. It's not vis-a-vis the competitors, but 11 of those are related to the Oceania and Regent brands, which really compete in their own unique set of, you know, operating space. They're not huge ships. You know, let's say on average they're what? 750-500, depending on the ship. That leaves Norwegian with 18 ships. We have so much room to grow with the Norwegian product. We only have 18 vessels. Keep that in mind. We can continue to expand. We need more ships. We've got to dispel that capacity growth concern. It's a good thing for us.
You know, this company is run by a bunch of entrepreneurs. Perhaps the others aren't. We do things differently, and perhaps the broader investment community doesn't recognize, because we are the smallest of the three, how different we are. I can't stress enough and hope enough that you guys begin to differentiate the difference between us and them. I think if you do, you'll like what you see. We're here to tell you that we are different in a much better way than. I don't want to be them. I don't aspire to be them. You know, I remember going to lunch with someone at brand X at a very, very high level. This is when I had nothing to do with Norwegian. I was running my little own Oceania Cruises.
Damn it, if it wasn't for that Norwegian brand who brings prices down, you know, we can generate 30% more EBITDA because we wouldn't have to compete with that low-priced Norwegian." This thing has flipped on its head. We're now the leading price. As we mentioned, and I think Mark mentioned, even if you take Oceania and Regent out of the equation, when we showed you those comparisons on pricing, Norwegian, if it was a standalone company, would still be number one. We do it differently, and we think the difference is better. Please don't throw us in the same pool. Look at us as a different company or as a different participant in the same industry.
Thank you.
I think Ivan has the mic.
Hi, Ivan Feinseth, Tigress Financial Partners. Thank you for this great event and congratulations again on this new ship and your incredible progress and the great cruise comeback. As far as stack ranking the priority of your excess cash and cash flow, at what point would you start to consider, like, repurchasing shares and, taking advantage of this unfortunate depressed stock price versus continuing on the trajectory to deleverage?
Yeah. Great question. You know, first and foremost, we're focused on paying down debt. You know, unfortunately, we do have a few restrictions in place. Keep in mind, through all of our partners, during COVID, we deferred over $1 billion of amortization that was scheduled over the course of 2020 and 2021. Until we repay that billion dollars, which is part of our scheduled maturity towers, it's about, you know, call it $300 million this year in 2023, $200 million in 2022, and then another $300 million or so in 2024. Until we repay that, we do not have the ability to repurchase shares. That's why we're so focused on reducing debt, paying down debt.
Because you're right, that's an unfortunate byproduct, but we can't participate in these crazy levels of the stock price, what we're seeing today, unfortunately. That's just something we have to work our way out of.
Thank you.
Great. Let's go Dan over here, and then on this side.
Hey, good afternoon, everyone. This is Dan Politzer from Wells Fargo. My first question is just, you have that slide on indirect and going to direct bookings. Can you talk about maybe the trend over time and how you see that playing out and what the possible upside to margin, how we should think about that, given, you know, relatively a 30% historic EBITDA margins? Is that a meaningful improvement? Is it something that's gonna take longer? Is it something you could see more in the short term? Any thoughts?
Yeah. Look, even before the pandemic, every year we would make modest inroads in generating more business direct. The pandemic caused all of us to live our lives a little bit different, right? We were holed up. We had not much to do. I bought a car online without seeing it. Bought a 1974 Jaguar at an auction, sight unseen, because I was bored that day.
I don't know when you were bored.
I-
You have so much going on.
It was a weekend, Sunday night. I subsequently sold it because it was a mistake. Everybody has gone online more. There's greater business online. At the same time, the travel agency community contracted. A lot of folks in the travel agency business worked from home even before the pandemic. Many of them were older. This was their third or fourth career. When we get back to business, trying to get back to business as usual, we're finding there are just less travel agents, and so we have to fill the ships one way or the other, right? We can't say, "Oh, well, travel agent community contracted by 20%, so we'll only go 80% full." Can't let that happen. We've been investing alongside the travel agents.
We wanna do more business with them. We think it's a pretty efficient channel, but we're gonna be wherever the customer wants us to be. If the customer wants to call direct, we will take their call direct, and that business is growing. What was one of the charts. The one that excites us the most because it is the lowest cost channel is the direct via our website. We're pouring money into developing the technology to make it easier, to make it more intuitive, promoting our website more. If you remember the percentage increase is greater than the overall direct business. Yeah, there is substantial savings if you can move that needle from the agency distribution channel to direct.
I know that a lot of analysts, maybe none of them in the room right now, used to salivate at, boy, if your average commission is 15%, all of that would go to the bottom line if you got rid of the travel agent. I think over time you guys got smarter about that it wouldn't all drop to the bottom line, because there is cost to replace that intermediary. I think that what we have found today is that there is balance. There's a certain amount of business that comes through the traditional travel agency channel, and we want that, and we want them to be successful, and we want them to grow because we're growing. I got eight ships coming. We also understand the dynamics there.
We understand how the population is now shopping, a lot of online, and that's where we're going as well. The opportunity is there, but we're not here to try to save money on commissions. That would be nice, but the bigger goal is fill the vessels at high prices. I've got 8 more coming over the next 5 years. That's what's gonna drive the bottom line.
Great.
Thanks. Just one quick follow-up or clarification rather. Your commentary on 2023 pricing significantly higher, we now have you know a better sense of what one of your peers has considered considerably higher. Is it safe to say that for 2023, when you talk about pricing that significantly higher is well above that mid-single-digit range relative to 2019?
Well above.
The 2023 pricing is well above your peers considerably.
Ah.
Dan, let me clarify. You know, at our earnings call in early August, we clearly said pricing was 20% higher than 2019. We said that was gonna be a one-time specific number. We're saying significantly right now. I'm not gonna tell you where that is, but.
I think he's asking will it be greater than the 19% growth? Right?
Oh.
I think we can say yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes. Thank you.
All right. This is our last question from the audience. We'll take over here.
Hi, Joe Farricielli from Cantor Fitzgerald. I understand about capacity and adding ships, but one of the things that attracted me to Norwegian was your smaller size. I would like to hear about maybe shedding some of the older ships. It's something you haven't talked about. I would imagine as you do that's gonna improve your margins as your fleet, you know. I know you already have a young age, but then it becomes even younger. Did you make money on the 74 Jag sale?
What? If I'm gonna make-
Did you make money on your Jaguar sale?
Lost $5,000. Wasn't bad. I saved it on agony with my wife, trust me. Anyway, we have the youngest fleet. We haven't disposed of any vessels our competitors have. You know, every year all the ships get older. We don't get to the point where a vessel turns 30, which is sort of, at least for accounting purposes, the maximum depreciable life of the asset until 2028. We will, and we have started to map out what vessels could leave the fleet in 2028. They don't have to, because we keep them up very, very well, and they're cash positive. We're gonna leave them. At age 30, their future is slim.
You know, one of the habits of the cruise industry is that every succeeding generation of ships is bigger than the one before. Except this one. You know, our Breakaway Plus vessels were all 4,000 passenger ships, and these are about 3,100-3,200. Obviously when we ordered these, it was before the pandemic. I didn't know that this was gonna happen, the pandemic was gonna happen, but we got lucky. Because I think today, everything else being equal, people would rather be with less people around them than with more. I'm glad that this vessel is smaller, that it's more intimate, that it's got all the spaces that I hope you get to see, and you gotta go to the racetrack. You're a car guy, I can tell. You gotta go to the racetrack.
I already went.
You did? Okay. You gotta go to the spa. You gotta go to the Galaxy Pavilion. These are unique areas. Go on deck 8 outside and look at the waterfront. So bigger isn't better necessarily. A bigger ship has a lot of inside cabin. What's the number 2 driver of yields? Balcony cabins. This ship has 72% balcony cabins. The Regent vessels, 100% balcony cabins. The Oceania vessels, 95% balcony cabins. So we're not into "Let's build the biggest." It's fine. I'm glad somebody else does that. We like the sizes that we have, and it contributes to the overall positioning of our brands within their categories.
Great. We're gonna take one last question from the online platform before we wrap up here. The last question here is: What innovations will set you apart from competitors in the future? Great.
I wish they can come on board and see this vessel. The package. You know, some ships are this, and some ships are that. I don't know what this ship is missing. We threw the kitchen sink at her, and it fits very well. Go to The Haven. Go to The Haven. Did you go to The Haven? Go to The Haven. You gotta see The Haven. The suites there are, you know, Four Seasons type. Go to The Haven outdoor area. Even the regular balcony cabins are fantastic. The restaurants, the quality of the food, the design, the artworks, the Galaxy Pavilion, the dry slides. It's innovation through product. Yesterday, Mark Kempa, I think, is up there somewhere, we were discussing three different menu items in one restaurant that I'm not happy with.
That's how deep into the details we, the senior management team, get into in developing the product. It's all about the product. I can fool you once. I can't fool you twice. 45%, 50%, and 55% repeat for the three brands suggest that we're not fooling anyone. People like what we have, they come back, and they pay more every time they come back 'cause prices keep going up. It's just a wonderful, you know, set of circumstances that just fits nicely into everything in the strategy that we're trying to accomplish here. It's all the pieces are fitting like a glove.
Okay, great. Well, we know we went over. I hope the passion came across, and that we can't stop talking about our product and how much we love it. We want you guys all to join us for lunch. We're gonna be going over to Hudson's, which is deck seven aft, all the way in the back of the ship on deck seven. There will be people outside to help direct you. Our leaders will be available for a Q&A there, so if we can try to proceed, just to get everyone over there, we can do a Q&A there. But thank you all so much again for joining us. We're always available for any questions. Thank you.