Sabre Corporation

Good morning, and welcome to the Sabre third quarter 2024 earnings conference call. My name is Rivka, and I will be your operator. As a reminder, please note that today's call is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to the Senior Vice President, Investor Relations and Treasurer, Brian Evans. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Sabre's third quarter 2024 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 effects of growth strategies, share growth and distribution volumes, results of our technology transformation, commercial and strategic arrangements, and our financial guidance and targets, free cash flow 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 Form 10-Q, for the quarter ended September 30, 2024. Throughout today's call, we will also be presenting certain non-GAAP financial measures. References during today's call to adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, and free cash flow 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 Kurt Eckert, President and CEO, and Mike Randolphie, Chief Financial Officer. Scott Wilson, EVP and President of Hospitality Solutions, will be available for Q&A after the prepared remarks. With that, I turn the call over to Kurt.

Thank you, Brian. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining today's presentation. I'm pleased to share that the Sabre team delivered significant commercial, operational, and financial achievements in the third quarter. Earlier today, we reported third quarter results that highlight the progress we are making toward our key strategic and financial priorities. We delivered steady year-on-year revenue growth, a significant increase in adjusted EBITDA, continued margin expansion, and positive free cash flow. We are on track to more than double adjusted EBITDA from 2023 to 2025. supported by the continued execution of our growth strategies, a strong focus on cost management, and the realization of cost savings objectives tied to our technology transformation. I commend our team members around the world for their commitment to innovation and their dedication to our customers. Turning to slide four, you can see an overview of the topics that Mike and I will cover this morning. First, I will review our third quarter business highlights including our financial performance. Then I will provide an overview of the progress that we have made on our growth strategies. Finally, Mike will take you through our third quarter financial results and discuss our updated 2024 guidance. Please turn to slide five. Sabre delivered solid improvement across key financial metrics in the third quarter. Revenue expansion was driven by an acceleration in the growth rate of air distribution bookings high single-digit growth in hotel distribution bookings, an increase in average booking fees, and continued hospitality solutions growth. Our top-line performance combined with effective cost management led to a 19% increase in adjusted EBITDA compared to the same quarter last year. Turning to slide six. During the quarter, we made significant progress on each of our key strategic priorities, which, as a reminder, are to generate positive free cash flow, deliver sustainable growth, drive innovation and enhance our value propositions, and reduce our cost base while repositioning resources toward growth. We will discuss many of these achievements throughout today's presentation. Turning to slide seven. Travel Solutions delivered steady financial progress in the third quarter, driven by solid growth in both air and hotel distribution bookings, higher average booking fees, and continued expansion of air distribution share. Sabre's air distribution bookings grew by greater than 3% year-on-year, outperforming the industry. Roughly half of this came from share expansion and the balance from market growth. Specifically, this acceleration in air bookings growth was fueled by the implementation of commercial wins, continued growth in corporate travel, and an improvement in Asia group bookings. Looking forward, we expect our year-on-year air distribution bookings growth to continue building momentum as we enter 2025, driven primarily by the progress we are making on our growth initiatives. On to slide eight. As we've emphasized throughout 2024, we have consistently grown our share of air distribution bookings. This chart shows that our share has expanded for the seventh consecutive quarter on a year-on-year basis. We are seeing positive trends in the air distribution business, particularly in corporate travel, where we hold a leading position. Sabre's corporate volumes grew between 3% and 4% in the quarter. We will shortly talk about specific commercial wins that are driving these results, and we expect to achieve further air distribution industry share gains from our strong commercial pipeline and contract wins that have yet to be implemented. Turning to slide 9, hospitality solutions revenue increased to $84 million, a 7% year-on-year improvement, representing the highest quarterly revenue in segment history. The increase was driven by higher overall customer deployments, continued growth in CRS transactions, and a favorable mix within our customer base. Strong revenue growth contributed to a 67% improvement in our adjusted EBITDA, to $11 million, with the business expected to continue building momentum in the quarters to come. Our high implementation remains on track. Prospectively, we expect both double-digit transaction and revenue growth, and we expect to achieve our full-year adjusted EBITDA target of nearly $40 million in 2024 and nearly $70 million in 2025. Please turn to slide 10. During Q3, We continue to invest aggressively in our six growth strategies, and I am pleased to share with you the progress we have made starting with Sabre Mosaic. Please turn to slide 11. Sabre Mosaic is designed over time to replace and modernize traditional PSS systems. This AI-powered technology platform designed to modernize travel retailing is open, modular, and flexible. enabling intelligent and personalized offers and orders that extend beyond seat and fare class to include a wide variety of additional ancillary and third-party service options. The graphic on the left of this slide provides an overview of the Saber Mosaic product suites. Our PSS agnostic approach, which means that this is architected to work with both Saber and non-Saber PSS platforms, gives each airline customer the ability to choose the solutions that fit its needs. Feedback from airlines and industry experts has been overwhelmingly positive. We believe Sabre Mosaic is the most advanced offer and order technology platform available in production to the global airline ecosystem. On to slide 12. We are already translating this early enthusiasm for Sabre Mosaic into commercial partnerships. Virgin Australia, one of the global airline industry's leading digital innovators, has selected our platform to modernize its retailing capabilities and will adopt Sabre Mosaic's full technology stack. Additionally, Riyadh Air, Saudi Arabia's newest flag carrier, has selected Sabre Mosaic to power its offer optimization technology and retailing capabilities. On to slide 13. Turning to our other growth strategies, We continue to build out our multi-source platform, which seamlessly offers NDC, low-cost carrier, and traditional artifact content with intelligent algorithms and efficient workflow integration. We are now in production with an early adopter program, connecting content from over 40 new LCCs to approximately 150 agencies, with a broader rollout expected in the coming quarters. Additionally, we have NDC integrations with 23 airlines currently live in the GDS. We also recently expanded relationships with Delta, WestJet, and TapAir Portugal to include NDC content. On distribution expansion, as I mentioned earlier, we achieved additional industry share gains. We recently announced a commercial agreement with World Travel Inc., a leading regional TMC, and one of the North American agency wins we referred to last quarter. We continue to sign new business and are implementing previously announced agency wins and we have a very rich pipeline. Accordingly, we believe we are well positioned to achieve at least 100 basis points of share gains on an annualized basis by the end of 2024 and annually for the foreseeable future. Hotel distribution experienced strong growth in the third quarter with bookings up 9% year on year, and our hotel attachment rate relative to air bookings increased approximately two percentage points year-on-year. We believe there is significant opportunity ahead to drive strong growth in hotel distribution. In our Conferma digital payments business, we realized significant contract wins, including Priceline, a leading OTA, and Furlong Fox, the largest corporate travel agency in Argentina. These wins and continued growth in virtual card deployments support our belief that our payments business will deliver meaningful, long-term revenue growth. Within IT Solutions, in addition to the progress with Sabre Mosaic, we signed and implemented an important agreement with Air Serbia, establishing Sabre as its NDC IT provider. Last, as mentioned earlier, we are gaining momentum in the hospitality solutions business. CRS renewals stand above 90%, and we are driving strong growth in Synexis Retailing, where adoption has doubled since the beginning of the year. In summary, we remain focused on these strategies and are building a strong foundation for long-term sustainable growth. I will now hand the call over to Mike to walk you through our financial performance and forward outlook.

Thanks, Kurt, and good morning, everyone. Please turn to slide 14. We achieved a number of important financial objectives in the third quarter. As you can see, we generated year-on-year revenue growth and delivered solid cost management that resulted in higher margins and strong flow through to the bottom line. Adjusted EBITDA in the third quarter was meaningfully higher year-on-year, and we generated positive free cash flow, which is a key strategic priority as we focus on improving our capital structure and deleveraging the balance sheet. We delivered these strong financial results while supporting investment in our six growth strategies, which we believe will drive sustainable top-line and bottom-line growth. Please turn to slide 15. We achieved solid year-on-year improvement across our key financial metrics. And as you can see in the table, these results are roughly in line with our expectations. The $10 million difference between our revenue guide of $775 million and actual revenue of $765 million is attributable to some small differences across various revenue streams versus our internal expectations. Based on early indicators, we see these factors carrying into the fourth quarter that are reflected in our updated guidance. Turning to slide 16, total third quarter revenue was $765 million, an increase of $24 million, or 3%, versus last year. Distribution revenue totaled $551 million, a $26 million, or a 5% increase compared to $525 million in Q3 2023. Our total distribution bookings were $93 million in the quarter, a 4% increase compared to $89 million in Q3 2023. And our average booking fee was $5.94 in the third quarter, up 1% from Q3 2023. Notably, Our air distribution bookings year-on-year growth rate demonstrated meaningful acceleration this quarter as compared to prior quarters. IT Solutions revenue totaled $140 million in the quarter. This was a $7 million decline versus revenue of $147 million in the prior year, primarily driven by previously disclosed demigrations. Hospitality Solutions Q3 2024 revenue increased 7%, or $5 million to $84 million. Adjusted EBITDA in the third quarter was $11 million, an improvement of $4 million versus prior year. This represents the strongest quarterly adjusted EBITDA for the segment in five years. And as Kurt mentioned earlier, we expect accelerating revenue and CRS transaction growth in hospitality solutions. and believe we are on track to achieve our full-year adjusted EBITDA target of nearly $40 million in 2024. Sabre's adjusted EBITDA of $131 million in Q3 2024 versus $110 million in Q3 2023 represented a $20 million improvement year-on-year. Lower unit costs from our technology transformation and strong cost discipline helped drive our adjusted EBITDA margin from 15% in Q3 2023 to 17% in the third quarter this year. Lastly, we generated free cash flow of $8 million in the quarter and ended with a cash balance of $690 million. Turning to slide 17. Regarding guidance for the fourth quarter, we expect revenue of approximately $715 million and adjusted EBITDA of approximately $115 million. We expect to generate greater than $80 million of free cash flow in the fourth quarter and expect to be positive for the full year, 2024. As a reminder, the fourth quarter is typically the lightest quarter for air distribution bookings. but the strongest quarter for free cash flow generation due to favorable seasonality in working capital. For the full year 2024, we now expect revenue of approximately $3 billion, $30 million, and adjusted EBITDA of approximately $515 million. As we exit 2024, we have strong momentum in a number of our important business drivers and believe we are on track to achieve our 2025 targets of greater than $700 million in adjusted EBITDA and greater than $200 million in free cash flow. Turning to slide 18, we believe the path we are pursuing has the potential to create significant long-term shareholder value. The target investments we are making in our six growth strategies coupled with prudent cost management, have driven, and we expect will continue to drive, meaningful increases in the justitibata and free cash flow. We believe our anticipated earnings improvement has the potential to increase enterprise value over the long term. As we prioritize utilizing expected free cash flow to pay down debt, we believe debt over time will comprise a smaller proportion and equity a larger proportion of our enterprise value further enhancing shareholder value. And with that, operator, please open the line for questions.

Thank you. At this time, we will conduct the question and answer session. To ask a question, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from the line of Josh Baer of Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.

Great. Thank you for the question. I guess want to dig in maybe to the revenue and sort of talking about small differences across several lines. I mean, hoping to get a little more color for the revenue miss versus the guidance there. And then, I mean, what I'm looking at like IT solutions growth down after growing last quarter just wondering even though like passengers boarded was flat like last quarter you had passengers boarded down but that segment still grew so maybe we can start there with overall revenue and IT solutions dynamics

Yeah, thanks for the question. You know, what I would say in terms of our revenue differences, you know, versus the 775, there's no discernible trend or anything really notable specifically to call out versus our internal expectations. It really was an aggregation of what I'd call some very small differences. For example, our air distribution bookings fell short of our internal expectations by 200,000 bookings on a $79 million margin. And so that's $1.2 million of the $10 million difference. And there's an aggregation, I'd say, of small differences like that that sum to $10 million. Now, with regards to IT solutions, we've talked about in prior quarters, IT solutions was generally in line with where we expected. We expected it to be, as we've talked about in prior quarters, roughly in the 140 to 145 range this year. And that's about where we're landing. And with regard to year-over-year, there was some in-period revenue last year associated with demigrated carriers, not attributable to PBs, that didn't necessarily repeat this year. Now, as we look forward, a couple of things that I would say with regards to airline IT specifically, as we've talked about, we believe we've stabilized that business. We think the baseline at this stage is in that $140 million to $145 million range on a But what I would say is as we are now getting past the impact of demigrations, two things will happen. You'll start to see the benefit of PB growth come through. But the other thing is, as we've noted, we've had significant commercial wins over the last several quarters. And as far as it goes with airline IT, that goes to Mosaic. You saw Virgin Australia announce the full offer order suite and working with us on that. You see Riyadh on the offer side. And so what I'd say is, as you look at the next few quarters going forward, we're probably in the $140 to $145 million range. But at some point during 2025, I expect it to start to reflect up meaningfully and start to see more growth in that revenue stream.

Great. That is helpful. And then the other topic I just wanted to ask about is free cash flow. You have EBITDA up considerably year over year. CapEx is about the same, I think. Just hoping you could talk about some of the moving pieces in working capital and the delta between the trajectory of EBITDA that we've seen this quarter and so far this year and free cash flow and what gives you confidence in getting to the positive mark for the full year? Like basically the, the big Q4. Thanks.

Yeah. Um, you know, first I would just highlight, you know, Q4 is typically our seasonally strongest free cash flow. Um, and so, um, what you, what we see in terms of, um, Q4 is aligned with our EBITDA, our working capital and the trends that we're seeing. So it does give us a high degree of confidence. Now, I'd remind you, if you go back and you replay the earnings calls from last year, last year we had generated about $150 million one-time benefit from our working capital initiatives off the balance sheet. So now we are lapping that. And so you don't get that same benefit anymore. this year. So those are the big differences year over year. But as we move forward, I would say we go into 2025. Like I said, for 2024, we expect to be breakeven. We expect to generate greater than $80 million in the Q4 of this year. And next year, we feel very, very much on track with our target of greater than $200 million next year. Great. Thanks.

One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Jed Kelly of Oppenheimer and Company. Your line is now open.

Hey, great. Thanks for taking my question. So in your prepared remark that, you know, air distribution is building momentum into 25, you know, should we expect, like, a slight reacceleration in that segment going into next year in order to hit that guidance? And then... Can you just talk about, you know, the overall travel environment, where we are, where you think we stand going into the next year? Thanks.

Yeah, with regard to air distributions booking. First, thanks, Jed. And with regards to, you know, air distribution bookings, you know, what I would remind you is over the last, you know, few months, you've heard Sabre announce significant commercial wins, world travel, We announced another one of the largest domestic agencies that hasn't been announced. Interpark triple, a new agency win last quarter in Spain and France. We've had significant progress on NDC. So my point on all that is those are recently agreed to agreements. We do not yet have the benefit of most of that in our air distribution booking. So with that, what I would say, and I'm not going to go too much into 2025 on this call, I'm going to save that for February. But what I would say is we feel very confident, very, very confident that as we move into 2025, you're going to see the benefit of those agreements that we've reached, and you're going to see a meaningful acceleration from share gains in our air distribution bookings.

Yeah, and with respect to the environment, Jed, obviously there's been sort of mixed macroeconomic news globally. Demand, both in corporate and leisure, remains pretty strong across all geographies. We're not seeing any real meaningful downward pressure. There obviously are some supply constraints on air. That's not meaningfully impacting our business, just a very small impact.

Got it. And then just as a follow-up, you know, just with the new winds, it kind of looks like, you know, if we look at it – You know, cost of revenue is about 57.5% of distribution revenue. Are these new wins, are they more high volume where they might put a little bit of pressure on the gross margins? Can you just talk about that dynamic? Thank you.

Yeah, thanks for that, Jed. You know, as I mentioned, the new wins that we've seen are largely not yet in our air distribution bookings and largely not yet in our results. You know, what I would say is you look at gross margin over time or look at cost of revenue, give or take around the 40% range. What I would say as we move forward, I would expect that gross margin would likely remain around 60% and cost of revenue would likely remain around 40%. Now, if you look at quarter by quarter, it gets lumpy because there's different types of incentives that get paid from time to time and different thresholds that get hit. You know, if I look at the prior two quarters, we had revenue growing faster than cost of revenue. And so I think you have to look at this over an extended period of time, but what I would say is if I were to foreshadow, I would expect us to still have a cost of revenue of roughly around 40% as we move forward over the longer term. Thank you.

As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star 11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Our next question comes from the line of Victor Chang of Bank of America. Your line is now open.

Hi, morning. Thanks for taking my questions, a couple if I may. Can you maybe give us some color as well on how you guide to Q4 with a bit of a lower revenue growth and the bookings performance Q4 to date? I think there seems to be a Turkish and frontier loss, but for course of that, is there any specific reason? Is it down to unfavorable economic terms and some of the rationale around that? And I have more follow-ups.

Yeah, thank you, Victor. With respect to Q4 and booking trends so far, I would say what we're seeing are trends that are relatively consistent with what we reported for Q3, nothing substantially different. As we look at Turkish and content generally, we obviously did not reach agreement on mutually beneficial terms with Turkish. And therefore, as you indicated, we don't have the content of Turkish currently. As we've said previously, we went to great lengths in our discussion with Turkish to reach a new agreement for both traditional and NDC content. We're disappointed that they were unwilling to consider terms that would allow us to meet the needs of the ecosystem, travel agencies, etc., to compete fairly for their business. And so we regret the challenges that this brings to the ecosystem. That said, we believe that the fully integrated breadth and depth of travel content that we have brings immense value to all parties in the ecosystem. And we hope to reach agreement with Turkish in the near future. I would mention that Turkish is a carrier with a relatively smaller home market. So the value of the distribution we bring we feel is tremendous.

we feel very good about our competitive position overall very clear and maybe if we talk about revenue per booking it seems to be there's still growing but a bit slower than previously should we expect you know normalized kind of revenue people can go forward uh any kind of implications or impact from pricing and mix or ndc going forward and Maybe last question is with regards to 25 outlook. Obviously, you talk about confident on over 700 million EBITDA in 25. But I guess if I look at the bridge that you had in kind of last year, and now we're experiencing some GDS volume growth, I guess that will bring you maybe closer to 750 or 800, depending on the share gains you have. With that bridge, is that still a realistic goal?

So, yeah, on the average booking fee, I'll start with that. So if you look at, if you move forward just sequentially, you look at the fourth quarter, I would expect in the fourth quarter for your average booking fee to tick back over $6. And there's a couple of things there. First, there's a small portion of revenue and distribution that's actually somewhat fixed. And seasonally, you generate less bookings in the fourth quarter. So that obviously... helps create a little bit of an upward trend seasonally. The second thing is, which also tends to be a seasonal impact, you have a lot fewer Asia group bookings that tend to have lower booking fees. So as I look to Q4, I would expect that the average booking fee would be comfortably over $6. As I look forward beyond that, I would say that I'd expect our average booking fee, you know, without getting into too much detail in 2025, you know, to be in that $6 range. Now, with that being said, with regard to our 2025 outlook, I would remind you on our February earnings call, we broke out our bridge for 2025, and we highlighted from 2023 to 2025. we would generate around $250 million of cost efficiency, partly from our tech transformation as well as other cost initiatives, and $115 million of strategic from our growth strategies. As we look at 2025, as I've articulated, we feel very confident that we're on track for greater than $700 million of adjusted EBITDA and greater than $200 million on free cash flow. I would highlight that commercial wins we have are part of our six growth strategies that Kurt has articulated, and that's included in that $115 million of strategic growth initiatives that we've outlined. Now, I would also highlight that our baseline assumption, separate from our growth initiatives, is for flat to moderate industry air bookings growth. Should that prove to be more favorable, as we've articulated, each point is worth about $13 million to adjusted EBITDA. So we think there's certainly potential to do better than $700 million, but at this stage, I would say we're very much on track toward our $700 million goal.

Okay, as a reminder, to ask a question, please press star 11 on your phone and wait for your name to be announced. This concludes the question and answer session. I would now like to turn it back over to Mr. Kurt Eckert for closing remarks.

Thank you very much, Operator. First of all, I'd like to have a moment of silence on behalf of my New York Yankees. Tough game last night. Seriously, we're happy with the progress we're making. As Mike indicated, we feel very much on track for the strategic transformation of Sabre, and we look forward to continuing to talk to you in future quarters about this. So thank you, and happy Halloween.

Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This concludes the program. You may now disconnect.