Sabre Reports 'Strong' Corporate Travel Growth in Q1

Corporate travel growth helped push Sabre's revenue up 5 percent year over year to $783 million in the first quarter, with Sabre's share of corporate travel bookings also on the rise during the quarter, executives said during an earnings call on Thursday.

Corporate bookings through global distributions systems in the first quarter were up 1.9 percent on a volume basis, Sabre CEO Kurt Ekert said in the call. For Sabre, that increase was in the 4.5 to 5 percent range, he said.

The increase in corporate business in the bookings mix contributed to a 7 percent increase in the average booking fee during the quarter, according to Sabre. Corporate travel growth trends in the second quarter are continuing "at relatively the same pace," Ekert said.

That marked a turnaround from the fourth quarter of 2023, when Sabre reported a slowdown in corporate travel. Ekert in the fourth quarter also said there has been an increase in airline direct-connect bookings with online travel agencies, and that continued into the first quarter. As such, the "strong" corporate growth was "a bit offset by leisure" during the quarter, he said.

Ekert noted that New Distribution Capability bookings still account only for about 1 percent of total global distribution system bookings, but he said that share should increase this year.

"We are very well positioned in terms of content connectivity and all the business logic and functionality we built for buyers," Ekert said. "There is work that buyers, such as [travel management companies], need to do from a downstream perspective on their end…but there is certainly a big focus on that from all those buyers, so we think that number will grow substantially, albeit off a low base."

Across Sabre's Travel Solutions business during the first quarter, total bookings were up 2 percent year over year. Air bookings were up 1 percent year over year, while lodging, ground and sea bookings were up 8 percent. Distribution revenue was up 9 percent year over year to $572.3 million.

Revenue for Sabre's Hospitality Solutions increased 7 percent year over year to $79 million. That increase was due to an increase in central reservation system transactions, which were up 5 percent year over year, according to Sabre.

Sabre reported a net loss of $71.5 million in the first quarter, compared with a $104.3 million loss in the first quarter of 2023. The company noted that the loss narrowed as operating income for the quarter improved to $98 million from "essentially break-even" the previous year, an improvement due in part to last year's cost-reduction plan and lower technology costs.

: Sabre Q4 results