Sabre invests USD150m into supporting new strategic goals

US-based travel tech firm Sabre has unveiled software and technology provider that powers the global travel industry, today announced they have sunk USD 150 million into a set of strategic priorities that the company believes will boost growth and create long term shareholder value.

As part of its vision to lead a new marketplace for personalised travel, Sabre detailed five strategic initiatives that are intended to increase the company’s addressable market across its business, deliver revenue and market share growth and improve the overall margin structure.

Sean Menke, Sabre’s president and CEO said, “We are committed to helping our customers operate more efficiently, drive revenue and offer personalised traveller experiences that create greater loyalty. Over the last year, we continued to see shifts in the travel ecosystem resulting in the changing needs of our airline, hotel and agency customers. We are thinking critically about how the retailing, distribution and fulfilment of travel will continue to evolve over the next decade and how each of these elements will become even more interconnected and interdependent.”

Sabre’s priorities are as follows:

• Create personalized offers: accelerating new IT capabilities, processes and intelligence that allow suppliers to retail personalized offers through all channels, unlocking more value per passenger boarded
• Accelerate the future of distribution & NDC: increasing the value of supplier offers and the value of the GDS by integrating NDC content, enabling airlines to distribute personalized offers through Sabre’s marketplace and through their direct channels
• Unlock growth potential in the LCC market: harnessing the growth and innovation of the fast-growing low cost carrier (LCC) market by creating more ways for LCCs to retail and distribute content, and scaling the offerings of the recently acquired LCC provider Radixx.
• Deliver a full-service property management system to better serve enterprise hotels:  collaborating with Accor, Sabre plans to build a full service property management system that will combine with its best-in-class central reservation system and state-of-the-art limited service property management system within a fully unified, cloud-native platform designed for hoteliers of all property classes, sizes and geographic regions – a milestone in the global travel industry
• Transform Sabre’s technology in a preferred partnership with Google: this 10-year strategic partnership is designed to:
  • Improve Sabre’s technology capability by migrating the company’s IT infrastructure to Google Cloud’s highly available and secure services with advanced support and greater flexibility
  • Utilize Google’s data analytics tools to enable Sabre to enhance the capabilities of current and future products by providing insights to help improve operational efficiency and create and optimize travel options, with the goal of improving both loyalty and revenues for its customers
  • Design a broader innovation framework with Google that seeks to leverage the talent and assets of both companies to imagine, develop and deploy future capabilities that will advance the travel ecosystem, benefiting all market participants.

Menke concluded his comments, saying: “At Sabre, we have the vision, the expertise and the planned investments in our end-to-end capabilities to become the trusted technology partner that brings it all together on one advanced travel platform. Building on the momentum we generated in 2019, we have committed USD150 million in 2020 to support the five strategic priorities and better position Sabre for revenue and share growth going forward. These priorities are designed to significantly enhance our technology and product offerings, increase our addressable market and create meaningful opportunities for profitable growth.”