Frank J. Del Rio
Management
Yeah. Look, in Q4, load factors are about flat year-over-year as are NPDs, roughly flat, slightly down. 72% of the inventory is already booked for Q4, so there is still 30% of the inventory to book. We're seeing better pricing over the last four weeks or five weeks, so we think that that NPD has a chance of recovering a little bit. In terms of 2017, as I mentioned earlier, Q1 looks very, very strong; looks very, very strong both in load and in pricing compared to the same period last year. As you sneak into Q2, the load factor isn't as strong as Q1. We're, in essence, down slightly, down very low-single-digits in load; and in pricing, we're up. So for the first six months of 2017, the period of time where we have some level of significant bookings, pricing is up mid- to high-single-digits and load factor is just about flat. So, against those expectations, remember, we're comparing a revised, more conservative outlook for 2017 compared to where we were this time last year when we were bullish. So the fact that we're even with last year, a year where at this point in time we didn't know about all these bad things that were going to happen that affected the marketplace as it has, I think, is a good thing. Because the built-in expectations for performance are a lot less for 2017 than they were this time last year for 2016, even though 2017 is performing on par with 2016 in terms of load and up on pricing. Now there's still a lot of bookings to be made before Q1 and Q2 are over. But at least at this early point, we feel very good about Q1, primarily because there's very little Europe in Q1. I feel less confident about Q2. But because of what we've baked into Q2 and Q3, et cetera, for next year, in full recognition of the weakness that Europe is displaying today, we can make the statement that we make that our EPS growth next year ought to be in the 15% to 25% range above what we did this year.