Carnival Corp.’s Glimpse into Non-GAAP Metrics
Cruise and hospitality giant Carnival Corp. ($CCL) delivered a solid earnings report last week , which gives us another opportunity to talk about one of our favorite financial analysis topics here at Calcbench: non-GAAP disclosures! Carnival discloses several non-GAAP metrics to help analysts understand the company’s operations. Most important are: Passenger cruise days , or “PCDs,” which is the number of cruise passengers on a voyage multiplied by the number of revenue-producing ship operating days for that voyage. PCDs are typically expressed as a number in the millions. Available lower-berth days , or “ALBDs.” This is a standard metric in the cruise industry to measure total possible capacity in a period, and is also measured in millions. Occupancy rate , which is calculated by dividing PCDs into ALBDs. Occupancy rates can be higher than 100 percent in the cruise business because ALBDs assume two berths per cabin, but in practice some cabins have more than two passengers (say, a fam...