Sabre Corporation

Good morning and welcome to the Sabre fourth quarter and full year 2021 earnings conference call. My name is Victor and I'll be your operator. As a reminder, please note today's call is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to the Vice President of Investor Relations. Kevin Christie, please go ahead.

Thanks Victor. Good morning everyone. Thank you for joining us for our full year and fourth quarter 2021 earnings call. This morning we issued an earnings press release which is available on our website at investors.SABR.com. A slide presentation, which accompanies today's prepared remarks, is also available during this call on the SABR Investor Relations webpage. A replay of today's call will be available on our website later this morning. We would like to advise you that our comments contain forward-looking statements that represent our beliefs or expectations about future events, including the duration and effects of COVID-19, industry and recovery trends, benefits from commercial and strategic arrangements, expected revenue, costs and expenses, cost savings, margins and liquidity, among others. All forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from the statements made on today's conference call. More information on these risks and uncertainties is contained in our earnings release issued this morning and our SEC filings, including our third quarter 2021 10Q and 2020 Form 10K. Throughout today's call, we will also be presenting certain non-GAAP financial measures. References during today's call to adjusted operating loss, adjusted net loss from continued operations, adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, adjusted EPS, free cash flow, and net debt to LTM-adjusted EBITDA have been adjusted to exclude certain items. The most directly comparable GAAP measures and reconciliations for non-GAAP measures are available in the earnings release and other documents posted on our website at investors.saver.com. Participating with me are Sean Minkey, our Chief Executive Officer, Kurt Eckert, our President, and Doug Barnett, our Chief Financial Officer. Scott Wilson, our President of Hospitality Solutions, will be available for Q&A after the prepared remarks.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Sean. Thanks, Kevin. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. As we know, the past two years have been extraordinarily disruptive. We, like others, have had to deal with numerous unpredictable headwinds. Despite these challenges, we never lost sight nor abandoned our focus on future opportunities. Some needed to be reprioritized. Others, specifically the technology transformation, continued notwithstanding the challenging environment. During our earnings call in February of 2020, we articulated the importance and expected benefits of our technology transformation. Despite these headwinds, we, with our partners, continued to execute. 2022 is the midpoint of these efforts. and we are intent on accomplishing our goals for the technology transformation. We are confident that we will accomplish these goals by the end of 2024, and we believe our advanced agile global technology footprint and efficient cost structure will be superior to our competitors. In 2025, we believe our full-year run rate efficiencies and accrued technology benefits will drive superior financial results under multiple scenarios when compared to 2019. The global travel recovery was slow at the beginning of the year, but that has changed significantly. February month-to-date global GDS bookings were on pace to reach a similar level of recovery versus the same period in 2019 as November 2021, which was the best month since the onset of COVID-19. For these reasons, we believe 2022 is shaping up to be a year of recovery and progress. Turning to slide four, Let me now provide an overview of the topics we will cover on today's call. I'll begin by discussing the considerable opportunity we see for Sabre and our investors as recovery takes hold and we reach the other side of COVID. Next, I'll provide an update regarding the ongoing travel recovery, including specific booking, passengers boarded, and hospitality CRS transaction trends, and how Omicron has temporarily affected the recovery. Then I'll detail our expected strong financial performance under specific recovery scenarios in 2025 and the investments we are making in our technology transformation to achieve these results. Finally, I'll turn the call over to Doug to walk you through the results of the quarter and financial outlook for 2022. But before I start, I do want to take a moment and thank my Sabre teammates around the world. 2021 was another challenging year for the travel industry and for Sabre. I believe my team members are aware, but it is important for me to emphasize how much I do appreciate their extraordinary efforts, serving our customers, looking out for one another, and at the same time, executing our transformation to help enable a new marketplace for personalized travel. I'd also like to welcome Kurt Eckert to his first earnings call at Sabre. Kurt joined us in January and is quickly learning the organization. Kurt's background and skills make him a perfect choice as president. He has had an exceptional understanding of the travel marketplace, global air in the hotel distribution, consumer e-commerce, and corporate travel. I look forward to working with him in the years to come. His arrival will allow me to continue to focus on our long-term strategy and goals for 2025, as well as to spend more time externally with our customers, investors, and other important constituents, something that I'm eager to do. I won't ask Kurt to present our results just yet, but thought it would be good for him to say a few words of introduction. Kurt? Thank you, Sean. I appreciate the welcome, and this is an exciting time to have joined Sabre. Having worked as an executive at one of Sabre's competitors, and more recently, at a top customer with CWT, I knew Sabre well from the outside. After just over a month, I'm gaining better appreciation for Sabre's many strengths firsthand.