Sabre Corporation

Good morning and welcome to Sabre's first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. My name is Siobhan 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 Vice President of Investor Relations, Jim Mathias. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning and welcome to our first quarter 2026 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 results of our growth strategies, our AI offerings, and AI-related developments in the industry, transactions and bookings growth, expectations regarding the Middle East conflict and recovery, commercial and strategic arrangements, the impact of geopolitical events, our financial guidance, outlook and expectations, pro forma financial information, 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 March 31st, 2026. 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, normalized adjusted EBITDA, normalized adjusted EBITDA margin, and adjusted technology and adjusted SG&A expenses 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. Normalized amounts have been adjusted for estimated costs historically allocated to our hospitality solutions business, which was sold on July 3, 2025. We are also presenting certain financial information on a pro forma basis to give effect to the sale of the Hospitality Solutions business. Unless otherwise noted, results presented are based on continuing operations. Effective this quarter, we have updated the terminology used to describe our revenue to better reflect our evolving brand identity and market positioning. Historically referred to as distribution and IT solutions, these revenue streams have been renamed to marketplace and airline technology, respectively. The specific revenue from products, services, and underlying solutions offered within each category remain unchanged. Participating with me today are Kurt Eckert, President and Chief Executive Officer, Mike Randolphie, Chief Financial Officer, Gary Wiseman, President, Product, and Engineering will be available for Q&A. With that, I will turn the call over to Kurt.

Thanks, Jim. Good morning and thank you for joining us. We are pleased with our first quarter performance as we delivered strong operating and financial results. Revenue grew 8% and normalized adjusted EBITDA agree 21% year-on-year to $169 million, significantly exceeding our expectations. We also achieved our highest rate of air distribution bookings growth in more than two years of 6%, and our data shows that this growth materially outpaced the industry. We are encouraged by the continued momentum we are seeing from our growth strategies. Despite impacts from the conflict in the Middle East and higher fuel prices affecting Sabre and the broader travel industry, we performed well in the first quarter and remain confident in our ability to produce sustained growth. Looking more closely at the Middle East, approximately 11% of Sabre's air distribution bookings either originate in or transit through the Middle East region. In March, these bookings declined by approximately 600 basis points. More specifically, flights that fly from, to, or through the region were down approximately 50%, while flights originating out of the Middle East declined approximately 70%. Additionally, we believe fuel supply and price dynamics, coupled with softening leisure travel demand, drove a roughly negative 100 basis point impact during the month. Taken together, we believe the combination of these impacts resulted in an approximate seven percentage point headwind to total air distribution bookings in the month of March. Importantly, offsetting these headwinds, we saw strong performance in other regions. In March, the Americas delivered approximately 7% growth, and corporate volumes demonstrated steady performance and resilience throughout the first quarter. Overall, air distribution bookings in March were roughly flat, reflecting the combined headwinds of the Middle East conflict and higher fuel prices, largely offset by solid performance in the Americas and the growth in corporate travel. The trends we saw in March continued through April, looking ahead while the geopolitical and macroeconomic environment remains dynamic. Our base assumption is that the conflict in the Middle East subsides during the second quarter, with fuel prices gradually normalizing through the summer and fall. Based on these assumptions, we expect second quarter air distribution bookings to be near flat, followed by a phased improvement, with conditions returning to a more normalized environment by the fourth quarter. Accordingly, we anticipate positive air distribution bookings growth for the second half of 2026, though at a slightly more modest pace than we had previously expected. Consistent with this view and aligned with recent airline commentary around capacity reductions, we now anticipate full year 2026 air distribution bookings and revenue to grow in the low to mid single digit range. Given our outperformance in the first quarter, and our outlook for the remainder of the year, we are reaffirming our full-year 2026 guidance for pro forma adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow. In summary, we are off to a strong start to the year. Solid execution, continued share gains, and our foundational role in enabling agentic, AI-powered travel solutions should position us well to deliver sustained long-term growth. Now turning to slide five and our strategic priorities. We delivered strong quarterly revenue with growth in both marketplace or distribution and airline technology. Revenue growth combined with strong cost performance resulted in quarterly normalized adjusted EBITDA that exceeded our expectations. In addition to reaffirming our outlook for both full-year pro forma adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow, we are confident in our ability to continue to drive solid top and bottom line growth and generate positive free cash flow in 2027. Our financial performance combined with no large debt maturities for approximately three years provides us with a foundation to continue investing in innovation, driving growth, and capitalizing on our leadership position in the emerging agentic AI channel. Turning to the right side of the slide, our technology investments are driving positive results. Our marketplace delivers multi-source travel content at incredible scale, and we generated strong air distribution bookings growth in the quarter. AI has been a core systemic part of the Sabre technology stack for several years, and we continue to lean into that advantage, which I will discuss in more detail shortly. Both our payment suite and lodging expansion continue to grow, with lodging expansion recording the 13th consecutive quarter of year-on-year revenue growth. And finally, on NDC, we exited 2025 with NDC bookings representing 4% of total bookings. We saw growth during the first quarter and expect NDC bookings to continue to accelerate during 2026. Moving to slide six and a review of first quarter results, which were positive across the board. Revenue grew 8% year-on-year Normalized adjusted EBITDA increased 21% year-on-year, and margin improved 235 basis points to 22%. Driving these strong results, total marketplace bookings grew 5% year-on-year, and air distribution bookings growth increased 6% year-on-year. Hotel distribution bookings increased by over 5% in the quarter to approximately 11 million. Our payment suite is one of the fastest-growing areas at Sabre. In the first quarter, revenue increased by over 25% year-on-year to $13 million. In airline technology, passengers boarded grew 3% year-on-year to $170 million, and we are pleased to have recently executed a seamless migration of bringing Hawaiian Airlines back onto our platform. Moving to slide seven. Sabre is a cloud-native platform and is a true super aggregator. providing the travel industry with the critical infrastructure necessary to shop, book, and service travel. Built on decades of industry technology leadership and supported by sustained investment of approximately 10% of revenue in product development and R&D, we believe we are well positioned to extend that leadership position into the rapidly emerging agentic AI travel channel. Our AI solutions help our customers compete and win in this emerging AI ecosystem, and with continued innovation, we intend to extend our leadership position. Sabre provides the foundational layer that is required for AI to transact in the complex environment of travel. Chatbots can generate itineraries, but to book and service travel at scale requires access to sophisticated, continuously evolving logic, and that is where Sabre plays a critical role. Our modular platform enables partners to integrate seamlessly wherever travel is sold. We aggregate and normalize real-time flight content across hundreds of sources in sub-second response times, solving a significant technical challenge. This capability is a key reason why partners are building on us, not around us. We have recently gone live with our ChatGPT OpenAI plugin for Virgin Australia. This all-in-one generative AI chat solution puts both search and flight shopping into a widely used AI interface and is available to all of our travel supply partners globally. We also recently launched the first phase of our MindTrip and PayPal partnership, with Sabre providing the core air booking layer. Sabre is bringing conversational commerce for flights to market for the first time, and we look forward to introducing additional enhancements over the next few quarters. Demand for our agentic APIs and MCP server is strong, with well over 30 potential partners in various stages of pilot or production. Additionally, we are working with airlines to deploy an AI assistant that will sit on top of our network planning and optimization product. Taken together, these are further proof points that the infrastructure for agentic travel is being built on Sabre. Moving to airline technology, We offer a growing suite of modular AI-driven solutions that meet customer demand and drive growth for Sabre. Building on the revenue growth we saw in the first quarter, we continue to expect positive airline technology revenue growth for 2026. Our marketplace provides a simple and single connection to industry-leading scaled content. Air expansion growth has been driven by execution of our growth strategies including continued share gains and growth in NDC and LCC bookings. We saw meaningful year-on-year acceleration in air distribution bookings growth in Q1 and expect positive air distribution bookings growth for the full year. Lodging expansion continues to scale, driven by a compelling value proposition in a large addressable market. Total hotel-related revenue increased 10 percent to over $80 million in the quarter, with annualized gross booking value of hotel bookings exceeding $20 billion. Our hotel attach rate is consistently above 30%, and with more modernized connectivity, we see additional opportunity for expansion. Meteor revenue also grew at a double-digit rate year-on-year. In payment suite, demand remains strong for solutions that simplify operations, increase payment flexibility, and automate risk and fraud management. First quarter gross spend on the platform reached nearly $6 billion, up more than 40%, while revenue grew over 25%. We are confident in our ability to continue to deliver strong performance and payments. We are executing well against our strategic priorities and delivering strong financial performance, even in a dynamic operating environment. With that, I'll now hand the call over to Mike, who will discuss our first quarter results and our outlook in greater detail.