Cruise and exploration company Lindblad Expeditions (NASDAQ: LIND) reported Q4 CY2025 results exceeding the market’s revenue expectations, with sales up 23.3% year on year to $183.2 million. The company expects the full year’s revenue to be around $825 million, close to analysts’ estimates. Its GAAP loss of $0.45 per share was 38% below analysts’ consensus estimates.
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Lindblad Expeditions (LIND) Q4 CY2025 Highlights:
- Revenue: $183.2 million vs analyst estimates of $167.7 million (23.3% year-on-year growth, 9.3% beat)
- EPS (GAAP): -$0.45 vs analyst expectations of -$0.33 (38% miss)
- Adjusted EBITDA: $14.15 million vs analyst estimates of $9.93 million (7.7% margin, 42.5% beat)
- EBITDA guidance for the upcoming financial year 2026 is $135 million at the midpoint, below analyst estimates of $136.8 million
- Operating Margin: -3%, down from -1.3% in the same quarter last year
- Free Cash Flow was $3.48 million, up from -$8.19 million in the same quarter last year
- Market Capitalization: $1.15 billion
Company Overview
Founded by explorer Sven-Olof Lindblad in 1979, Lindblad Expeditions (NASDAQ: LIND) offers cruising experiences to remote destinations in partnership with National Geographic.
Revenue Growth
Examining a company’s long-term performance can provide clues about its quality. Any business can experience short-term success, but top-performing ones enjoy sustained growth for years. Luckily, Lindblad Expeditions’s sales grew at an impressive 56.4% compounded annual growth rate over the last five years. Its growth beat the average consumer discretionary company and shows its offerings resonate with customers.
We at StockStory place the most emphasis on long-term growth, but within consumer discretionary, a stretched historical view may miss a company riding a successful new property or trend. Lindblad Expeditions’s recent performance shows its demand has slowed significantly as its annualized revenue growth of 16.4% over the last two years was well below its five-year trend. 
This quarter, Lindblad Expeditions reported robust year-on-year revenue growth of 23.3%, and its $183.2 million of revenue topped Wall Street estimates by 9.3%.
Looking ahead, sell-side analysts expect revenue to grow 6.8% over the next 12 months, a deceleration versus the last two years. This projection doesn't excite us and implies its products and services will see some demand headwinds.
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Operating Margin
Lindblad Expeditions’s operating margin has been trending up over the last 12 months and averaged 5.2% over the last two years. The company’s higher efficiency is a breath of fresh air, but its suboptimal cost structure means it still sports inadequate profitability for a consumer discretionary business.
This quarter, Lindblad Expeditions generated an operating margin profit margin of negative 3%, down 1.7 percentage points year on year. This reduction is quite minuscule and indicates the company’s overall cost structure has been relatively stable.
Earnings Per Share
Revenue trends explain a company’s historical growth, but the long-term change in earnings per share (EPS) points to the profitability of that growth – for example, a company could inflate its sales through excessive spending on advertising and promotions.
Although Lindblad Expeditions’s full-year earnings are still negative, it reduced its losses and improved its EPS by 20.5% annually over the last five years. The next few quarters will be critical for assessing its long-term profitability.
In Q4, Lindblad Expeditions reported EPS of negative $0.45, up from negative $0.48 in the same quarter last year. Despite growing year on year, this print missed analysts’ estimates. Over the next 12 months, Wall Street is optimistic. Analysts forecast Lindblad Expeditions’s full-year EPS of negative $0.63 will flip to positive $0.05.
Key Takeaways from Lindblad Expeditions’s Q4 Results
We were impressed by how significantly Lindblad Expeditions blew past analysts’ EBITDA expectations this quarter. We were also excited its revenue outperformed Wall Street’s estimates by a wide margin. On the other hand, its EPS missed and its full-year EBITDA guidance fell slightly short of Wall Street’s estimates. Overall, this print was mixed but still had some key positives. The stock traded up 2% to $21.16 immediately following the results.
So do we think Lindblad Expeditions is an attractive buy at the current price? We think that the latest quarter is only one piece of the longer-term business quality puzzle. Quality, when combined with valuation, can help determine if the stock is a buy. We cover that in our actionable full research report which you can read here (it’s free).
