Harry J. Sommer
President and Chief Executive Officer-Elect at Norwegian Cruise Line
Thank you, Frank. And before I get started I have to say that I'm honored and grateful to be given the opportunity to lead this iconic company. Growing up immigrant [Phonetic] working-class parents in the Bronx, I could never have dreamed to be at the helm of such a storied brand, but Frank, you took me under your wings early in my career, and it taught so much over the last three decades. I know I speak on behalf of the entire NCLH team, when I say thank you Frank for your countless contributions not only to our company, but also to the broader cruise industry. I look forward to building on this remarkable legacy, and I am committed to doing everything I can to best position this company for continued success.
Over the next few months I will be speaking with travel partners, team members, destination representatives, the investment community and a whole host of constituents, while working closely with our executive team to fine-tune our plan and vision for the future and I look forward to sharing details with you. Shifting our attention to the bar drop -- to the backdrop that makes me so optimistic for what lies ahead, Slide 7 outlines our current positioning and the key catalysts we see now, in on-the-horizon. We cover our leadership transition already, which could not have gone smoother, so I will skip ahead to what continues to be a healthy demand environment. Our target consumer remains resilient, with a persistent desire for travel and experiences.
Our booking window, which is our best forward-looking indicator of remains strong. In fact, we were encouraged to see that even with the banking sector driven financial market volatility in March, we did not experience any unusual booking or cancellation activity across any of our brands. Our onboard revenue generation, which is our best real-time indicator of how consumers are feeling financially is also performing exceptionally well, and we are even more pleased with the depth and breadth of the strength across revenue streams, ships and regions.
During the quarter, gross onboard revenue per passenger cruise day was nearly 30% higher than the comparable 2019 period, this is driven in-part by our focus on attracting the best guests and enhancing our market-leading bundled offering. We are also increasing quality touchpoints with our guests, starting with the time of looking to capture even more revenue and pre-payment prior to cruise. Our presold revenue on a per passenger day basis for the first quarter of 2023, is approximately double the level in 2019, an important contributor to our onboard revenue strength as guests who make pre-cruise purchases tend to spend significantly more than guests who do not pre-book onboard activities.
Turning to our next catalyst. We continue to take strategic actions across our business to improve operating efficiencies and right-size our cost base to rebuild and enhance margins. The results of this initiative already beginning to bear fruit as demonstrated by our first quarter adjusted net cruise cost excluding fuel per capacity day, which was not only 14% below the run rate in the second half of 2022, but also outperformed our guidance by $4 as certain savings were realized earlier than anticipated. We expect this metric to continue to show modest sequential improvement each quarter for the remainder of 2023, as seen on Slide 8.
I want to stress that we recognize and acknowledge while this is a great start, we still have more work to do. This initiative is very much ongoing and will continue to be a top-priority under my leadership. We are committed to identifying and evaluating incremental opportunities across every area of the business to help accelerate our margin recovery. This does not mean however, that we will not continue to invest in our product or service offering to enhance our guest experience, but rather that we will be even more strategic and data-driven when making these decisions to ensure we are investing where we see the highest returns and most impact.
A good example of this is our recent announcement regarding the rollout of the Starlink Low-latency Broadband Internet System in a phased manner across our fleet. This is a strategic and cost effective initiative to help address the consistent pain point we hear from guests, regarding the reliability and speed of internet connectivity at sea. This is one example of our focus on finding the right balance, which is critical to keeping our brand's value propositions intact, maintain our incredibly loyal past guest base and continually attract new cruisers to sail on our world-class fleet for what we believe is the best vacation experience in the world.
The last catalyst to highlight is our industry-leading newbuild pipeline shown on Slide 9, which Frank already touched on briefly. Capacity growth in 2023 is expected to be just shy of 20% compared to 2019, as we add over 5,000 berths to our world-class fleet. And as we look out over the next five years, this increases to approximately 50% growth versus 2019. All three of our brands are well-poised to profitably absorb this elevated capacity of growth, given our relative size and under-penetration in many markets around the world.
We are focused on better leveraging our scale as we embarked on this period of transformational growth, and translating this capacity growth into outside benefits to both the top and bottom line, this makes for an attractive entry point for investors as the newbuild pipeline adds significant potential future earnings power, compared to today's levels. When combined with our ongoing efforts to maximize profitability on our existing fleet, including by delivering consistent year-over-year moderate yield growth, we view this as a winning formula.
Shifting our discussion now to our booking demand and pricing trends, you can see on Slide 10, we reached load factors of 101.5% in the first quarter, exceeding our guidance and breaking triple-digit levels for the first time in three years with some voyages exceeding occupancy of about 115%. With this significant achievement, we have also nearly closed the occupancy gap versus 2019 levels. In the second quarter, we expect to average 105% occupancy, a return to normalized levels with cabins fully sold, this average is slightly below 2019 levels as a result of our strategic shift to longer more immersive itineraries at the Norwegian Cruise Line brand naturally resulting in less thirds-and-fourths [Phonetic], which is what historically pushes passenger occupancy above the 100% mark, all while enhancing margin over time.
Turning to Slide 11, after a very strong WAVE season cumulative booked position for the balance of 2023 remains ahead of 2019's record performance and at higher prices. Demand and pricing continues to be strong, not only for 2023, but also as we look further out the sailings in 2024 and beyond. To give you an example, bookings for regions 2026 World Cruise were nearly 70% higher than its 2022 World Cruise, which was the last World Cruise launched pre-pandemic, at an average price point of over $230,000 per suite, another strong indicator that our product continues to resonate with our guests is the performance of NCL's CruiseNext program, an onboard program in which we sell non-refundable future cruise certificates.
In the first quarter, CruiseNext achieved its highest quarterly result in the program's history, surpassing the previous record. As we look to the remainder of the year. Our substantial book position coupled with the continued healthy demand metrics we are experiencing gives us confidence in achieving our 2023 net per diem and net yield guidance, which Mark will touch on in more detail momentarily.
Before I turn the call over, I'd like to provide an update on our decarbonization efforts as part of our global sustainability program, Sail & Sustain, something that I'm very passionate about and committed to advancing. As shown on Slide 12, coinciding with Earth Day last week, we announced new short and near-term greenhouse gas emission intensity reduction targets to help guide us on our pursuit of net zero by 2050. We are targeting a 10% reduction in GHG intensity by 2026, and 25% by 2030, the scope of these targets cover our direct submissions, as well as the full well-to-wake impact of our fuel consumption.
As we execute on this plan, we expect to see a dual benefit of not only initial reductions, but also cost-savings from reduced fuel consumption. We also revamped our climate action strategy, which is now centered on three key pillars, efficiency, innovation and collaboration. We are implementing solutions for efficiency today; innovating for future solutions, including with our investments in modified two of our future newbuilds to create methanol-ready configurations; and are committed to collaborating with our stakeholders and partners along the way.
With that, I will now turn the call over to Mark for his commentary on our financial position and outlook. Mark?
