Sabre Corporation

Good morning and welcome to the Sabre third quarter 2023 earnings conference call. My name is Felicia Crabtree and I will be your operator. As a reminder, please note today's call is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to the Senior Director of Investor Relations, Brian Roberts. Brian, please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone.

Welcome to Saber's third quarter 2023 earnings call. This morning, we issued an earnings press release, which is available on our website at investors.saber.com. A slide presentation, which accompanies today's prepared remarks, is also available during this call on the Saber Investor Relations webpage. A replay of today's call will be available on our website later this morning. We advise you that our comments contain forward-looking statements that represent our beliefs or expectations about future events. including the impact and extent of the ongoing recovery from the effects of COVID-19, industry trends, benefits from our technology transformation, commercial and strategic arrangements, strategic priorities, our financial outlook and targets, expected revenue, adjusted EBITDA, free cash flow, costs and expenses, cost savings and reductions, 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 2023 Form 10-Q. Throughout today's call, we will also be presenting certain non-GAAP financial measures. References during today's call to adjusted operating income, adjusted net income, adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, adjusted EPS and free cash flow have been adjusted to exclude certain items. The most directly comparable gap measures and reconciliations for non-gap measures are available in the earnings release and other documents posted on our website at investors.saber.com. Participating with me are Kurt Eckert, President and CEO, and Mike Randolfi, Chief Financial Officer. Scott Wilson, EVP and President of Hospitality Solutions, will be available for Q&A after the prepared remarks. With that, I will turn the call over to Kurt.

Thank you, Brian. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We had a successful third quarter and have a number of recent accomplishments to articulate on today's call, including financial results that exceeded expectations, new developments in our strategic partnership with Google, important commercial wins and development successes, as well as the continued execution of our technology transformation. In the third quarter, we exceeded our financial expectations And this performance gives us confidence that our strategies to drive sustainable growth with a more efficient operation are delivering results. The positive momentum that we saw earlier in the year has continued. Our four strategic priorities, which I will review shortly, are unchanged and form the foundation of our resource allocation and strategic decision making. Before jumping into the details of today's call, Allow me to commend all of Sabre's employees for their hard work and dedication to meeting the needs of our customers. The strong results we are sharing this morning would not be possible without the commitment of all of our team members around the world. Now I will walk through the agenda for today's call. On slide four, you can see an overview of the topics Mike and I will cover. First, I will review our business highlights from the third quarter, And then I will describe trends that give us confidence in the fundamentals of our business and Sabre's ability to deliver on our priorities. Next, I will provide details on our customer successes and innovation achievements during the third quarter, and then update the progress in our technology transformation. Finally, Mike will take you through the financial results for the third quarter and provide an update to our 2023 outlook. Turning to slide five. As we have mentioned in recent quarters, these are the four key strategic priorities that drive the long-term direction for the company. As I refer to each priority, I will discuss our accomplishments that highlight our progress towards achieving each of these objectives. First, generating positive free cash flow and de-levering the balance sheet remain our most important financial objectives. Solid revenue growth and meaningful cost actions combined to deliver better Q3 results than we had anticipated. Our performance translated into nearly a 100% flow through of revenue growth to adjusted EBITDA, which helped deliver solid free cash flow in the quarter. This flow through is illustrative of the strong operating leverage potential of Sabre tied to future top line growth. And as Mike will describe in more detail later, We have also taken significant steps toward de-risking our balance sheet by extending the vast majority of our 2025 maturities out to 2027 and beyond. On our second priority, which is to achieve sustainable long-term growth, we again increased Sabre's share of industry air distribution bookings on a year-over-year basis during the third quarter. We also saw sequential share gains from the second to the third quarter as our efforts to expand our reach with both agencies and airlines continue to show positive results. In addition, I am pleased with our recent customer wins and new product announcements that we achieved this quarter. And I will provide more details on these topics in a moment. Turning to hospitality solutions, our team continues to execute well and delivered excellent top and bottom line growth in Q3. And please keep in mind that the strong results delivered by the team this year do not yet include incremental business from our recently announced agreement with Hyatt. I am excited about the recent developments that support our third strategic priority, which is to drive innovation and enhance our value propositions with both existing and new customers. While our technology transformation to migrate from the mainframe to Google Cloud has been moving at pace over the past few years. Another team of Sabre engineers has been co-developing products and solutions utilizing Google's state-of-the-art AI and machine learning capabilities. Several of our recent announcements show the powerful results of this and other key strategic partnerships. For example, our new agreement with Virgin Australia takes that carrier's revenue management capabilities to the next level. by harnessing the power of Sabre's AI-driven retail intelligence suite, our next generation solution powered in part by Google's machine learning technology. Under this unique agreement, Virgin Australia will deploy our air price IQ and ancillary IQ solutions to utilize flight and market insights to move from static pricing rules to more dynamic real-time airfare and ancillary offers. In addition, we recently launched Sabre Upgrade IQ, a PSS agnostic revenue management solution that will help our airline customers deliver more personalized and tailored offers to better manage premium cabin inventory. This powerful solution is the product of our strategic partnerships with both Google and Hopper. Upgrade IQ combines Google's AI technology with Hopper's advanced bidding platform to facilitate the premium seat bidding process by enabling airlines to communicate in real time with travelers in multiple languages. Also, we launched our new Lodging AI solution, which embeds Google's advanced machine learning technology to expand our suite of intelligent retailing services to hotel distribution. This new offering marks the introduction of Sabre Travel AI capabilities into the lodging sector where we see significant opportunities to better align hotel property attributes with customer trip segmentation and preferences to deliver more personalized offerings. Last, our technology transformation to the cloud continues on schedule. We are realizing both cost efficiency gains and strategic go-to-market advantages from our cloud infrastructure and Google partnership. In addition, we are seeing significant financial benefits from our cost reduction efforts, and we are on track to realize in 2024 the full $200 million of annual reduced costs that we have previously discussed. In summary, during the third quarter, our team delivered on these priorities, and we remain focused on creating long-term value for our customers, our employees, and our shareholders. Now let's turn to slide six. As I mentioned previously, our efforts to drive sustainable revenue growth with a lower cost structure resulted in meaningful margin expansion and generated strong adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow growth. As this chart shows, the trajectory of our adjusted EBITDA improvement accelerated in the third quarter, and we continue to see opportunities for further growth ahead. Turning to slide seven. During our most recent two earnings calls, we used this table to highlight the increasing share of GDS industry bookings that we have achieved. And as you can see, our share in Q3 23 again expanded on both a year-over-year basis versus Q3 22 and on a sequential basis versus last quarter. We are pleased with these results to date and expect that signed but not yet implemented GDS deals a robust pipeline, and our strong competitive distribution offering position us well for continued share gains and future growth. Please turn to slide eight. I am pleased to review a number of successful business wins and differentiated product offerings with you today that span both travel solutions and hospitality solutions. We continue to see significant momentum in hospitality solutions. Most notably, we are well advanced in our implementation work with Hyatt to provide them with our Synexis central reservation system technology. Our platform will offer enhanced capabilities that will allow Hyatt to improve the experience of its guests. We expect to begin to go live with Hyatt starting in the first half of 2024. In addition to our work with Hyatt, StayWell, the large Australian hospitality provider, recently selected Arsenics' platform to enhance and improve their IT infrastructure. In distribution, we were pleased to sign a new agreement with Air France KLM that includes enriched NDC-sourced content along with EDIFACT content to deliver modern travel retailing technology. This agreement will provide global travelers with increasingly sophisticated offers with greater choice and transparency, while enabling Air France and KLM to distribute customized NDC offers powered by continuous pricing and the ability to tailor personalized offer bundles. In addition, we announced a second agreement with Air India, a top 10 global airline within the GDS industry earlier this week to bring that carrier's domestic content to Sabre's platform. This complements our existing agreement for Air India's international content that we announced in April. Importantly, Air India's domestic content was previously exclusively offered by only one GDS, and this new agreement highlights the value of Sabre's global scale and reach to our customers and our potential to outpace the rate of growth in our industry. We also recently signed an enhanced agreement with LATSAM Airlines Group, Latin America's largest airline, to distribute deck carriers' traditional at-effect content, as well as its NDC offers, to the global network of Sabre connected agencies. Once this new NDC connection goes live, it will enable hundreds of thousands of Sabre connected agencies and travel buyers to have an even richer experience with a broader range of LATAM's products and services. In addition to these important agreements, we also signed with Scandinavian Airlines and Virgin Australia to provide agencies with significantly expanded access to content and offers from these carriers, including dynamically priced fares and new ancillary services. These agreements are further evidence that leading airlines seeking modern travel technology solutions continue to choose Sabre. And we are hard at work building the leading next-generation multi-source travel ecosystem to seamlessly incorporate personalized NDC offers alongside other content. On the agency front, we signed a number of agreements with both new and existing customers in Q3, some of which we have announced. Examples include our new win with Unififi, a high-growth Chinese business growing into North America, a deepening of our relationship with Last Minute, one of the top European OTAs specializing in dynamic packaging, and a renewal with Tidesquare, a large and fast-growing agency based in Korea. In IT solutions, as mentioned earlier, Virgin Australia selected our Intelligent Retailing Solutions. This partnership will bring the power of Sabre's AirPrice IQ and Ancillary IQ solutions to help Virgin Australia move to more dynamic pricing and intelligent real-time offers, all powered by Sabre Travel AI. During the quarter, we also signed a Sabre Sonic contract extension with Air Serbia, a Radix renewal with SAF Air, and an agreement to migrate Saudia's network planning and optimization to SAS. In summary, Sabre achieved a number of commercial wins during the third quarter that will help us deliver on our strategic priorities. I will now move on to our technology transformation. Please turn to slide nine. Our technology transformation continues on track to deliver our previously articulated cost savings and operational targets. As you can see in the table at the right, our unit cost of compute continues to decline. The significant efficiency gains we have seen from moving off of the mainframe to Google Cloud helped drive the 10% decrease in our overall adjusted technology costs that we reported in the third quarter on a year-over-year basis. In terms of operational milestones, we are on track to complete the Tulsa mid-range server exit by year-end, as we have communicated previously. Overall, our technology transformation and innovation are cornerstones of our competitive capabilities, and we expect to continue to leverage our important strategic partnerships and offerings to deliver better overall experiences to both buyers and suppliers within the global travel marketplace. Now onto slide 10. In closing, we again delivered on our priorities in the third quarter. We generated significant margin expansion and strong free cash flow, signed important customer agreements, and launched compelling new products that utilized the best-in-class technology capabilities of our key strategic partners. I am proud of our team for delivering these results, and I am confident that Sabre is well positioned to continue delivering on our strategic and financial priorities in the coming quarters. I will now hand the call over to Mike to walk you through our third quarter performance and our full year 2023 expectations. Thanks, Kurt.

And good morning, everyone. Please turn to slide 11. As Kurt mentioned, we have a number of accomplishments to share with you that highlight the hard work of our Sabre team members. The third quarter was a strong quarter for Sabre and an important inflection point in several of our key financial and strategic metrics. We exceeded guidance in the quarter on solid revenue growth and cost actions that led to significant margin expansion and strong free cash flow generation. Our technology transformation and previously announced cost reductions helped drive operating costs down on a year-over-year basis. The powerful combination of steady revenue growth and falling cost led to a nearly 100% flow through of incremental revenue dollars to adjusted EBITDA. As you can see on this slide, Sabre generated strong year-over-year improvement in cash from operations and free cash flow. Hospitality Solutions continues to drive better financial results faster than we had anticipated earlier this year. and is now on track to produce an approximate $40 million improvement in adjusted EBITDA this year versus last year. Additionally, our recent debt exchange offer to extend our 2025 debt maturities out to 2027 better aligns future prospective free cash flow with our debt maturity schedule. Overall, the third quarter represents an inflection point. We are delivering on the actions we set out to achieve and are generating strong financial results that represent a meaningful trajectory shift from the last few years and highlight the potential of SABR's path forward. Please turn to slide 12. As you can see from the table, we exceeded our expectations for third quarter revenue, adjusted EBITDA, and free cash flow. And we are encouraged by the momentum we are seeing in our financial results. Strong revenue generation, coupled with the actions we have taken to lower our cost base, has driven margin expansion and increased our free cash flow generation. This quarter's free cash flow generation is the highest in approximately four years. Turning to slide 13, total Q3 revenue was $740 million, an increase of $77 million, or 12% versus last year. Distribution revenue totaled $525 million, a $94 million or 22% increase compared to $431 million in Q3 2022. Our distribution bookings totaled $89 million in the quarter, a 12% increase compared to $80 million in Q3 2022. Our average booking fee was $5.87 in the third quarter, up 9% from Q3 2022 as we continue to realize favorable mix into more profitable regions and types of travel resulting in higher booking fees. IT solutions revenue totaled $147 million in the quarter. This was a $26 million decline versus revenue of $173 million in the comparable prior year period driven by demigrations the vast majority of which is the result of changes in Russian law. Hospitality Solutions revenue totaled approximately $79 million, an $11 million or 16% improvement versus revenue of $67 million in Q3 2022. The 16 points of revenue growth was driven by seven points of central reservation systems transaction growth and nine points of higher rate per transaction, Hospitality Solutions generated $6.4 million in the third quarter and $7.9 million of adjusted EBITDA on a year-to-date basis and is tracking to an approximate $40 million adjusted EBITDA improvement this year versus 2022. In addition, our recently announced CRS deal with Hyatt, which we expect to go live in 2024, should contribute to the momentum we are already seeing in hospitality solutions. Sabre's adjusted EBITDA of $110 million in Q3 2023 versus $34 million in Q3 2022 represented a $76 million improvement year over year. Before I move on, I will highlight the significant impact that our cost reduction program is having on our financial performance. The $76 million year-over-year increase in adjusted EBITDA in Q3 represents virtually 100% flow-through of the $77 million year-over-year increase in revenue we achieved over the same period. Free cash flow was $39 million in the third quarter, including the impact of restructuring charges, which was better than our prior guidance for free cash flow of $20 million. Free cash flow, excluding the impact of restructuring, was $58 million, which was better than our prior guidance of approximately $50 million. This was the first third quarter since Q3 2019 that Sabre has delivered positive free cash flow. We ended the third quarter with a cash balance of $623 million. During the quarter, we used $130 million in cash from the balance sheet in connection with our most recent financing. Before moving to guidance, let's discuss the actions we took during the third quarter to address our 2025 maturities. Turning to slide 14. I cannot thank the team enough for their hard work in shifting our financial trajectory, which facilitated the actions on our debt maturities. Our recent debt exchange offer and the private facility we executed in June have addressed the vast majority of our nearest term 2025 debt maturities. Importantly, the cash we have on the balance sheet at the end of the third quarter exceeds the cumulative debt maturities through the end of 2026. Moving to slide 15 to discuss our guidance. For the full year, we still expect revenue between $2.9 billion and $3 billion unchanged from last quarter, but at the higher end of our initial expectations for 2023 that we provided in February for revenue of between $2.8 billion and $3 billion. Moving to adjusted EBITDA, we now expect adjusted EBITDA for the full year 2023 of approximately $345 million, above our prior guidance last quarter for adjusted EBITDA of approximately $340 million, and about 10% above the midpoint of the initial guidance we provided in February for adjusted EBITDA between $300 million and $320 million. We believe continued revenue growth coupled with the significant cost actions we have taken to improve our efficiency and expand our margins is supportive of improving adjusted EBITDA generation moving forward. And our free cash flow, as noted on our prior earnings call, we expect to be free cash flow positive for full year 2023, excluding the impact of restructuring. This includes an assumption of approximately $80 million in 2023 for capital expenditures and approximately $375 million in cash interest costs for the full year 2023. We are currently in our annual and long-term planning process, and we expect to provide more details on our 2024 outlook and 2025 targets during our Q4 earnings call in February. As a reminder, our 2025 targets for $900 million in adjusted EBITDA and $500 million in free cash flow include an assumption for industry air volume growth of one to two points sequentially per quarter. In recent quarters, we have seen industry air volume growth come in below these levels. As indicated on our May earnings call, when we discussed our long term targets, each one point of air bookings growth between 2023 and 2025 is worth approximately $12 million in adjusted EBITDA on an annual basis. In closing, Steady revenue growth and operating performance drove significant margin expansion for the quarter and nearly 100% flow-through of revenue to adjusted EBITDA, which resulted in meaningful free cash flow generation. In conjunction with these items, our debt exchange offer and extension of our 2025 maturities represented an important step in delivering on our strategic priorities that Kurt outlined earlier on this call. And with that operator, please open the line for questions.

Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Jed Kelly of Oppenheimer. Jed, please go ahead.

Hey, great, great. Thanks for taking my questions. Just two, if I may. You know, nice job. Your tech costs were down about 10%, you highlighted. I mean, is that the right way to think about the velocity of those costs going down going forward? And then just falling back, Mike, on your previous comments, you mentioned, you know, airline industry growth had kind of slowed one point of 12 billion adjusted EBITDA on an annual basis. Is there any change to your 25 outlook? And, you know, are you expecting similar incremental EBITDA growth in 24? Thanks.

Yeah, thanks for the question. You know, on tech costs, obviously, we've made significant progress there. You know, what I would highlight is in the beginning, when we had articulated our resource realignment and cost reduction program back in May, the way we highlighted or talked about the trends and what someone should expect is taking the first quarter expenses for cost of revenue, tech expenses, and SG&A, if you annualize those, and you annualize those, and then you subtracted the $100 million of cost reduction that would occur this year, that $100 million, about 10% of it would apply to cost of revenue, about 45% would apply to the tech costs, and about 45% would apply to SG&A. And that's what would drive our, that would be the resulting trend in terms of costs. So, The trends you're seeing are trends we would expect to sustain on expenses.

Jed, you may recall that as we provided the guidance and we looked at the 25 target back in May, we articulated that $300 million of the build toward 2025 improvement would come from reductions in both our technology costs and other costs. Close to two-thirds of that would be reductions in technology costs in the next couple of years. Yes, thank you.

And then further, what I would also highlight on that May call, we also highlighted and talked about our bill from 2023 to 2025. And in that bill, we talked about going from approximately $300 million of adjusted EBITDA to approximately $900 million of adjusted EBITDA in 2025. And there are really three components. The very first component, as Kurt just mentioned, is that $300 million. With the $300 million being comprised of the resource realignment and cost reduction program that we saw this year, which would be about $100 million of it, our technology transformation costs, which we expect to generate at least $150 million of benefit from 23 to 2025, and then also just rigor around the non-labor, non-tech cost for the remainder of the bucket. That bucket and those cost savings are very, very much on track, and you see that here today. The second bucket was our strategic growth initiatives. If you recall, that was $150 million attributable to that bucket. Of that $150 million, at least a third or at least $50 million we would expect from hospitality solutions. You could see the significant trajectory shift we've seen in that business. And then the second part of that or the next $50 million would be increased market share. And you see that this quarter we gained share both sequentially and on a year-over-year basis. And then the third part of it is things like payments, airline retailing, which are all growing really, really, really well. The third bucket, as you highlight, is volume. And the volume piece, each point is approximately $12 million. Now, what I'd highlight is there's two different components as we look at volume. In the more recent period, as noted in the third quarter, we have seen some flattening in volume. To date, we've been able to offset that with favorable revenue and cost. Also, as we look forward and we look at what airlines are telegraphing, they're generally telegraphing capacity growth, call it in the mid to upper mid-single digits with the SKU to international that has historically accrued to the GDSs. And so that's what we know at this moment. Beyond that, what I would say is We're working through our 2024 planning process and our 2025 planning process right now. We're going to respect that process and come back to you in February with a more fulsome update on the next two years.

Thank you. Just one follow-up. Just on the Air India contract, can you speak to the incentives you agreed to? You know, I've Heard from your prior management team, they historically didn't want to go into India just because that market was tough from a unit economic perspective. Thanks.

Yeah, thanks, Jed. India is one of the largest GDS distribution markets in the world. As we indicated in the prepared remarks, one of our competitors had exclusive content with Air India, which is one of the larger carriers there. So this unlocks one of the largest GDS markets in the world for us. which was not previously largely addressable or available to us. So as we think about the opportunity to gain share and gain share in emerging parts of the world, we're really encouraged about this. Commercially and technically, the deal we've done there makes great sense for us, and we think for our agency customers as well.

Thank you. One moment for our next question.

The next question comes from the line of Josh Bayer of Morgan Stanley. Josh, please go ahead.

Thank you for the question. I wanted to ask around NDC. I think there were several press releases in the last couple months about NDC announcements for you. I just wanted to ask what's driving the momentum now and from a product standpoint? How you think your NDC offerings compare, like from a competitive standpoint? Are there still areas of sort of investment or, you know, yeah, investment around NDC as far as, you know, your solutions looking ahead?

Yeah, Josh, thank you very much for the question. So today, NDC represents a very small part of intermediary airline distribution. in the range of about 1% from everything that we can see and that we're experiencing. And this is 11 years after approximately IATA launched NDC as a construct. That said, what you've heard and seen from many carriers around the world is a desire to sell their inventory more dynamically in B2B as they do in B2C, and this is a mechanism to help accomplish that. So there is strategic rationale as airlines become better and better at retailing, and we as an intermediary want to help airlines differentiate and sell their product as they want to sell it, which is very important. One of the things that is changing in the ecosystem is that this is not just about plugging into the node of the Airline NDC API, but more so it's building the functionality that is required for buyers, corporations and agencies, for example, to be able to do things in a manner that works for them and drives efficiency and drives user experience without degrading those two things, as would happen if you simply plugged in the content into their existing infrastructures. So I can tell you, for example, that by the end of the year, we will have built out 90% of the use cases that are required by our AT&T customers, and there are about 600 unique use cases that are new, so that we're able to make sure that both sides of the ecosystem are able to balance that. We've talked about what we're building is a multi-source content platform that enables us to seamlessly consume both EDIFACT and NBC content, and then onward distribute that in normalized fashion to and through any buyers in the world. We believe that what we're producing will be the best platform in the industry for the long term and support the needs of both the suppliers, but do it in a way, again, that makes sense for the buyer community. So we feel very good about where NDC is going to go in future years.

And the only thing I would add on that is as we discuss forward-looking commentary, incorporated in that forward-looking commentary is an expectation that NDC continues to grow And our forward-looking commentary reflects that.

Perfect. Thank you. And if I could just ask one on the 2025, sort of the $900 million plus in EBITDA going to $500 in free cash flow, if you could talk through some of the assumptions on working capital in those numbers, just thinking through interest, taxes, but then also just working capital in that bridge. It's a free cash flow.

Yeah, I'm not going to go into too many specifics on that at this time, Josh. What I would say is we are not assuming a significant impact on working capital either positively or negatively in 2025. But beyond that, we'll provide just a more fulsome update in February on 24 and 25. Okay, thanks.

One moment for your next question.

The next question comes from the line of Dan Wazliak of Morning Star. Dan, please go ahead.

Good morning, guys. Thanks for taking my question. So just going back to the $150 million strategic growth and the 2025 guidance, I think you guys have said that at least one-third is coming from hospitality. Any color you can provide on how much high it kind of gets you to that one-third is And then what would you anticipate would be the implementation timeframe for Hyatt? I know you guys said on this quarter that it will begin in the first half of next year. Thanks.

Dan, thank you. Good question. So when we look at the strategic growth initiatives, just to collar them once again, and we looked at $150 million of EBITDA accretion between now and 2025, what we articulated was we expect to see one-third of that from hospitality solutions. one-third from GDS share growth, and one-third from an amalgam of airline retailing payments, hotel attachment. Specific to hospitality solutions and Hyatt, we're not going to break out the details of the agreement with Hyatt, but it is indicative of the traction that we're getting with Synexis, which traditionally has been the leading mid-market hotel CRS provider. But this basically demonstrates our ability to compete and win in the enterprise CRS space. And so what I want to do is turn it over to Scott Wilson, who leads HS, and he can talk in more detail about the implementation and the value that we're bringing there.

Thanks, Curt. Thanks, Dan. Yeah. So you actually got Curt in on a couple of things that are really important here. But let's start with the IAPs. The implementation, as we mentioned, is going to be starting in the first half of the year. And we believe that we'll be vastly completed with it by the end of next year. So most of that revenue gain that we expect through that contract is going to be fully realized by the end of next year, which we think is just a great accomplishment by the team and our partner in Hyatt. Second, Kurt talked about the Synexis platform overall continues to be very strong within the market. We actually have renewal rates this year that are highest they've been since the pandemic. In fact, some of the highest ever. And we continue to win new business in areas outside of the enterprise space as well. And the third key piece is the introduction of Retail Studio this year, which really unlocks a new TAM for us, which is around retailing in the hotel space, something that's a little bit more mature in the airline space, but has a lot of growth and upside that we're seeing good traction on in the hotel space as well. You take those three things combined, and we feel very good about that $50 million that will contribute by the end of 2025.

Okay, great. Very helpful. And then if I can just squeeze in one more quick one. Any color that you can give on just how air booking trends have been trending over your key regions? And that's it for me. Thanks.

Sure. I'll just talk about it in terms of what we're seeing in terms of recovery relative to 2019. I mean, as you know, I mean, for the most part, North America is fully recovered. What you've seen is... Asia is probably still recovered versus 2019 in the mid-60s. Europe is like in the 70s. I would say the one trend that we've seen that's a little more notable, we've actually seen Latin America back up a little bit over the last few months. And that's trended back a little bit. But that's generally what we've seen.

Okay. Thank you. One moment for your next question.

The next question comes from the line of Victor Chen of Bank of America. Victor, please go ahead.

Hi, Monin. Thanks for taking my questions, a couple if I may. Just going back to, well, on the point on revenue for booking, can you give us some color? Obviously, 9% improvement year-on-year is very solid. I'm sure there's some pricing element and a mix improving. um and often you talk about it you know depending on region mix homeland away mix and business leisure mix but maybe one question i want to ask is does it matter which um what tier of airlines uh are the bookings associated with the question i asked about this is as over the last couple months we've seen american airlines moving a bit more into ndc united moving to ndc as well um And it seems that if the volumes are coming down for these tailwind carriers, which presumably has a lower revenue per booking, that has a tailwind on revenue per booking. Is that the right assumption to think, or am I off?

Victor, thank you. And let me start and then turn over to Mike. So first of all, NDC today represents only about 1% of the GDS marketplace. So the impact on the average fee per booking is relatively small.

Yeah, thanks. That's a very important part. So the primary driver is really that we've seen within the mix regionally. We've seen our mix be pretty favorable. And really, within the carrier mix, it's been favorable. We have skewed to carriers where the average booking fee is higher. But to Kurt's point, the impact from NDC has been de minimis on our average booking fee. And it's really that NDC at this stage is a very, very, very small part of the industry. And from everything we see represents, you know, one, maybe one to two percent of intermediary distribution globally.

Yeah, gotcha. It's, you know, I was just looking at some data from ARK talking about U.S. bookings. I mean, they talk about 10 plus percent of NDC bookings as as a percentage of indirect U.S. bookings? And if GDS as a whole is still roughly, like you said, 1% to 2%, does that mean that as some of the bookings get shifted to NDC that GDS is not capturing that opportunity?

Hey, Victor. Thank you for the question. I think there's two things that get conflated in the industry. One is called Direct Connect. The other is NDC. Direct connect is where typically larger OTAs have direct connected with airlines. And this started back 10 to 15 years ago. And they basically have done that without the use of GDSs. So that's nothing new in the industry. And we think that that has for a while represented about 10% of global airline intermediary distribution. That would be Priceline with United, for example. And within that, I don't know the construct of what is traditional versus NBC in terms of what goes through those pipes. What I can tell you, though, is if you look outside of that 10%, is we're not seeing any change in the structure of the marketplace. Corporate, as you know, has recovered to about 75% on a unit basis of what it was in 2019, albeit much higher on a dollar basis. We believe that substantially all of that business continues to flow through our sector. And in all the other forms of leisure distribution, we don't think there's been a change either. So I think that what you have is that within the Direct Connect channel, again, which has been there for quite a long period of time preceding COVID, that there may be certain activity there that carriers are calling new technology. But within the true intermediary marketplace, we don't see any change.

Yeah, one other thing I would highlight, Victor, is as you think about NDC and you think about economics, generally what we're seeing is that the economics of NDC agreements look pretty similar to what you see today around most of the globe, with the exception of Europe, where Europe, as you know, has some of the highest booking fees around the globe. But for Sabre, that only represents 15% of our bookings. And so, you know, the transition, we wouldn't expect to have nearly a significant impact, you know, maybe a little bit more in that region.

Got it. Very clear. And maybe if I can squeeze in one last one, a note to that, you know, passing this bullet in the airline IT side also appears to be a tad lower quarter-on-quarter as a percentage of 2019. If you can provide a bit of color as to kind of what's trending in there.

Yeah, on airline IT, I mean, the primary impact on a year-over-year basis is going to be the demigrations, the vast majority of which is attributable to Russia. That impact is about $33 million. If you adjust for that, you'd obviously have growth in airline IT driven by higher passengers boarded.

All right, got it. Thank you. One moment for your next question.

The next question comes from the line of Tobias Fromm of Bernstein. Tobias, please go ahead.

Good morning, gentlemen. Thank you for taking my question. It's just one from me. I wanted to deep dive into the air bookings again. It appears that the air bookings recovery has all but flatlined this quarter. Could you comment on this and shed some light on whether potentially a new normal level has been reached? How do you see that going into Q4, also considering that you've just commented on the recovery is still ongoing everywhere else. Thank you.

Tobias, thank you. When you look at the GDS marketplace, which is what we're talking about here, traditionally, that marketplace has been comprised of about 50% corporate or TMC bookings and about 50% leisure. As we've indicated, corporate has recovered to about 75% on a unit basis of 2019 levels. Now, air and hotel yields are much higher. So the dollar recovery is actually much higher or much closer to historical norms. One of the things that's acting as a governor, we believe, on corporate travel is corporate or procurement budgeting, where they basically are saying you can only grow the corporation by so much year on year. The good news is, as you think about corporate travel historically, it was a closer one and a half trillion dollar sector before covid. and over the 20-year history, including the impact of 9-11 and the financial crisis, had a 4% to 5% annual CAGR. So certainly we expect that part of the business to grow as it has grown traditionally. Has there been some impairment relative to the size of that sector? We don't know at this point, but that is possible. And then when you look at leisure recovery, leisure is the other sort of half of the GDS sector. it leans much more toward complex long-haul international travel, where more simple point-to-point domestic travel has tended to accrue to direct airline distribution historically. We think that's the case. And so what's happened is capacity has not been put back as substantially on long-haul international as it has been put back on short-haul. We think that has disproportionately negatively impacted the GDS business. So you're right that the recovery has been slower than we had anticipated in the past two quarters. We're not going to comment prospectively other than let me just say again what Mike said, which is in the build toward the $900 million EBITDA target for 2025, we had indicated back in May that that came with the assumption of a 1% to 2% or 1.5% quarterly sequential growth in market size. We're assessing what we believe is going to be the trend over the next couple of years. And we'll come back in February with updated guidance.

Yeah, and the only other thing I would add with regards to 2023 and our fourth quarter assumptions incorporated in that is we assumed what we've seen is current trends, which are closer to flat in the third quarter. And I would say if you back into our Q4 expectations, you could see it's amongst the best adjusted EBITDA performance in years. We would expect it to be the best free cash flow generative quarter in years. And so we're really pleased with our performance and we are really seeing on those actions which we can control, we're delivering.

Thank you. One moment for your final question.

The final question comes from the line of James DeGaulle. from Redburn Atlantic. James, please go ahead.

Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking my question. I just want to just follow up in terms of sort of current bookings. We've heard many U.S. and European airlines talking positively about a pickup in managed business travel spend into the winter period. So I'm just wondering if that sort of flat sequential booking that you saw Q2 to Q3 has scope to increase going into Q4.

Yeah, thanks for the question, Josh. You know, one, you know, while there are reasons to be optimistic, we've framed our guide really based on the trends we've seen coming out of 2023. So what I would say is, I mean, out of Q3, so in Q3, I mean, we obviously saw flatter booking trends than we'd like, but those are the assumptions that we took into our Q4 assumption.

I should say we feel, given our footprint with TMCs that handle much of the managed travel business. We feel very well positioned as that part of the market recovers to benefit from that.

Very clear. Thank you. And then I guess maybe just a very long-term question on the airline IT side. I mean, I've got the impression that many more airlines, including your largest PSS customer, are readying themselves towards the transition away from legacy PSS architecture and towards sort of offer order-based systems. So I was just wondering if you could talk to how well you think you'll set up for that transition, what you've developed to date would be great. Thank you.

James, thank you. As we've indicated, everybody is pursuing this long-term agenda of IATA's one order standard, which is the new offer order P&R list technology. We have invested very aggressively in both offer and order capabilities. The tip of the spear where we're going to market and leading right now is on the retail intelligence suite of solutions. We're beginning to get great market traction with customers signing up and buying this because it doesn't require wholesale operating changes on their side to implement these capabilities. One of the challenges with offer and order is that a lot of the airline systems, processes, and organizations are built around the traditional P&R, PSS structure. And so most carriers see this as a long-term multi-year journey. you know, seven, 10, maybe more years. So we're in conversation with a number of both Sabre and non-Sabre PSS customers about working with them on this journey and providing our technology. So we think there's an opportunity for us to disrupt the marketplace and we're leaning in very aggressively to what we believe is a great opportunity. Brilliant. Thank you.

Thank you. I would now like to turn it back over to Kurt Eckert for closing remarks.

Thank you, and thank you again for joining us today. We appreciate your interest in SABR and look forward to speaking with you again soon. And that concludes today's call.

Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude this program. You may now disconnect.