Many Carnival Cruise ships come home to Miami, but CEO Arnold Donald makes sure they’re spending their workdays all over the world.
Carnival Corp.’s President and CEO Arnold Donald aboard the Carnival Victory. The executive is helping steer the massive Miami-based company in a new direction.
The world’s two largest navies are the US and Russian fleets. Its third? “Fun Ships,” as Carnival Corp. refers to its boats, all part of a master plan to revamp and reignite an industry hit by freak accidents and logistical nightmares. From partnering with local musical sensation DJ Irie on its “Spin U” DJ Academy for teens to on-board concerts featuring everyone from Lady Antebellum to Jennifer Hudson to Gavin DeGraw, Carnival is easing passengers’ hesitancy to cruise. That job of revamping image and experience is up to Miami-based “admiral” Arnold Donald, president and CEO of Carnival, which now boasts 102 ships sailing every ocean and sea on the planet, visiting more than 700 ports every year and representing no fewer than seven different brands.
And yet, growing up in New Orleans in the Ninth Ward, “I never imagined that I’d be in any way involved in this kind of business,” says the 59-year-old Donald, laughing. Sure, as a child he would watch the riverboats move slowly down the Mississippi. But when it came time to choose a career, Donald opted to stay on land—or, when he worked in the petroleum industry, to hop on board a seaplane or helicopter to reach offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.
“We’re providing families with lifetime memories,” says Donald, on the Victory with the Miami skyline in the background.
After stepping back from his previous major corporate position at Monsanto, where he had served as president of the company’s agricultural division and its consumer and nutrition sector, Donald and a group of investors purchased the agribusiness’s Equal artificial sweetener business and established it as a stand-alone company, Merisant. That not only taught him the ins and outs of running a company, but what it takes to build a brand. It also led him to Carnival; one of his fellow investors in Merisant was on the cruise line’s board of directors, and nominated Donald to join. “A dozen years [on the board] showed me that I had an affinity for the industry and a liking and respect for Micky Arison,” then Carnival’s CEO and now its chairman. “So when they asked me to take on the CEO job, all that led me to say ‘yes’!”
Now he has 10 million passengers scattered from Shanghai to Istanbul to Antarctica. And Donald took over at a time when cruise brands were finding the seas choppier than usual: In 2012, the Costa Concordia, which had been part of Costa Cruises, a Carnival brand based in Genoa, Italy, capsized, killing 32 people; a month later, another ship in the same family was adrift in the Indian Ocean for a few days after an engine room fire left it without power. (There were no injuries.) A February 2013 engine fire aboard the Carnival Triumph left passengers marooned at sea.
One of Carnival’s newest ships, the Costa Diadema.
Enter Donald, no stranger to tough times. The son of parents who never completed high school, he was born into a segregated New Orleans, where he was constantly reminded of the limits imposed by his skin color. But admission to St. Augustine High School, a famous Roman Catholic all-African-American boys’ school, meant opportunity. “My parents saw education as a way out, and at high school, the mission was to instill in us the sense that we could be anything we wanted to be,” says Donald. “I always believed I could do anything I set my mind to as a result.” He’s now one of only a handful of African-American CEOs running major corporations in the US.
Burnishing Carnival’s image and completing its comeback from the havoc wreaked by the 2008 recession was simply a matter of being focused. Part of the challenge, he says, is about marketing. “We need to make sure that people get on the right ship: For each of us, there is going to be a cruise experience that resonates.” A Carnival Cruise is for social butterflies. If your tastes run toward pampering and unique experiences, sail a Seabourn voyage, where you can indulge in butler service before hopping onto a Zodiac to see a rookery full of rare birds. Another focus is catering to the more discerning who want private restaurants and chance-of-a-lifetime excursions, upping the game of luxury travel.
Donald is often one of the first people up the companionway when the Miami-based liners dock. “I am checking out our guests: Are they smiling? Are they tired?” When he’s not in his offices or aboard a ship, he’s in his Ocean Drive apartment, with panoramic views of the ocean and, not coincidentally, the ships. “I love Miami, but I love cruising, too. That’s why I understand just how important this business is: We’re providing families with lifetime memories.”