PG: Stepping back for a second, what was the first cruise you ever took?

KS: I took one cruise before I joined the company and I took it with my family up to the Baltic.

PG: On which line?

KS: On Celebrity. It was actually a great cruise.

PG: What did you learn from that?

KS: I learned that you were able to have a very varied vacation experience where the ship enabled you to visit many different places. We went up through the Baltic up to Saint Petersburg and we saw Berlin and we saw Estonia. We saw places that otherwise we wouldn’t have known and my kids were at that perfect age getting ready for the serious school years and so they had a fascinating experience.

Even though it was a competitor, we still talk about it as a wonderful vacation experience.

So I knew when I had this opportunity to come to Norwegian that it was going to be a wonderful, game changing career move for me, taking a company and driving it from good to great.

PG: Now, when you got to this company, I mean financially speaking, the company was not good.

KS: It was a very difficult time. I don’t want to say it too meanly but it was poorly managed. There was not a success attitude here, there wasn’t passion, there wasn’t innovation, there wasn’t the kind of team effort that can drive performance. So that was part of the fun of taking this company and turning it around, bringing in a new set of people. We did something different that had never been done in the industry before because we took people from outside the industry. Just taking a business and saying ‘How do you fix this business? How do you move the salient things that are on the ship and turn it into successful formulas?’

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