Sabre reports first quarter 2016 financial results

Sabre Corporation (NASDAQ: SABR), one of the global leaders in travel technology solutions, reported its first quarter 2016 financial results this week.

Sabre reported strong growth in the first quarter 2016. “Our solid start to the year sets us on a course to meet our full-year operational and financial objectives,” said Tom Klein, Sabre president and CEO. “Our focus on creating platforms for innovation and enabling our customers' success continues to drive our growth. The breadth of our software solutions and depth of our customer relationships uniquely positions us to continue to define and lead the travel technology industry.” 

The company’s business focuses on two lines of business and reports results in those categories:  Travel Network, a global travel marketplace that connects more than 425,000 travel agencies and travel management companies in more than 160 countries with airlines, hotels, car hire, cruise lines, tour operators and other travel suppliers across the world, and the Airline and Hospitality Solutions business, which provides technology software solutions and consulting to the global airline and hospitality industries.  For the first quarter 2016, highlights included:

• Travel Network revenue increased by 23%, while bookings increased 28%
• Travel Network growth was driven by last year’s Abacus acquisition and bookings growth across much of the world, driving global market share up 1.7 points to 37.4 percent
• Travel Network experienced gains in every region
• In the Airline and Hospitality Solutions business, revenue increased 16 percent
• 183 million passengers were boarded using the SabreSonic reservations system – a growth of 45 percent year-over-year.  The American Airlines migration in Q4 2015 and Air Seychelles SabreSonic migration in March 2016 contributed to this increase
• In January 2016, Sabre closed its acquisition of Trust Group, taking the number of hotel properties using Sabre’s guest reservations system to over 30,000 worldwide 
• Significant progress on the rollout of the SynXis property management system in the first quarter, with hundreds of properties live, and implementation continued at Wyndham Hotel Group which operates more than 7,800 hotel properties worldwide

Outside of North America, the company reported the following:

• EMEA led global Travel Network growth, where bookings, driven by new agency conversions and solid share gains, increased 12 percent – more than five times the overall GDS market growth in the region
• In APAC, the integration of the Abacus business into Travel Network continued to help drive growth and the strong market share in the region gives the company a platform for new business development.

“We continue to innovate to enable change in the industries we serve while earning a greater share of the technology spend in those growing sectors,” said Klein during a conference call to investors on April 28.  “We are seeing very positive customer response to our new product offerings and our ability to execute on our customers’ behalf.

“As the only provider that goes to market with our broad capabilities, we have a unique advantage of being able to see opportunities and needs across a very broad spectrum of the industries we serve.   Our customers expect us to bring them new innovations and new technologies that can have a big impact on their business.   As we execute against our deep investments in platforms, processes, and tools that increase our clock speed of innovation, we will capture a greater share of an increasing pie of technology spend,” said Klein.

“Every time we introduce new innovations like Sabre Red Workspace 3.0 in Travel Network and Revenue Optimizer in Airlines Solutions – two new products that will be on display at our upcoming Investor Day – we view that as an opportunity to not only increase our share of market, but to potentially increase the size of the overall spend in the market.   We are selling into a very good environment that rewards innovators and is hard on those competitors that cannot keep pace,” said Klein.

U.S.-based Sabre is headquartered in the greater Dallas-Fort Worth region of Texas, and processes more than US$120 billion of estimated travel spend annually, serving customers in more than 160 countries around the world.  It has nearly 10,000 employees globally.  

Earnings release

For additional information, please refer to our earnings release located on our Investor Relations website here: http://investors.sabre.com/common/download/download.cfm?companyid=AMDA-2OXSEI&fileid=888465&filekey=713BFA4E-85AB-475B-802E-DB53BB351E28&filename=SABRE_Q1_2016_Earnings_Release_FINAL_20160427.pdf

Forward-looking statements

Certain statements herein are forward-looking statements about trends, future events, uncertainties and our plans and expectations of what may happen in the future. Any statements that are not historical or current facts are forward-looking statements. In many cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by terms such as "will," "expect," "anticipate," "may,” “should,” “would,” “intend,” “believe,” “potential” or the negative of these terms or other comparable terminology. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause Sabre’s actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performances or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. The potential risks and uncertainties include, among others, dependency on transaction volumes in the global travel industry, particularly air travel transaction volumes, the financial and business effects of acquisitions, including integration of these acquisitions, adverse global and regional economic and political conditions, including, but not limited to, economic conditions in countries or regions with traditionally high levels of exports to China or that have commodities-based economies, risks arising from global operations, exposure to pricing pressure in the Travel Network business, the implementation and effects of new agreements, dependence on maintaining and renewing contracts with customers and other counterparties, dependence on relationships with travel buyers, changes affecting travel supplier customers, travel suppliers’ usage of alternative distribution models, and competition in the travel distribution market and solutions markets.  Information about potential risks and uncertainties that could affect our business and results of operations is included in the “Risk Factors” and “Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements” sections included in our Annual Report on Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on February 19, 2016. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, we cannot guarantee future events, outlook, guidance, results, actions, levels of activity, performance or achievements. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. Unless required by law, Sabre undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements to reflect circumstances or events after the date they are made.