Competing in Travel’s Next Era with Sabre's CEO Kurt Ekert - The #Phocuswright Conference
Summary
In this fireside chat at The Phocuswright Conference, Sabre CEO Kurt Ekert speaks with PhocusWire executive editor Linda Fox about the company's transformation and the forces reshaping travel distribution. Ekert, who became CEO in 2023, outlines two core strategic objectives he set upon taking the role: driving growth through innovation and deleveraging Sabre's balance sheet. On the debt front, Sabre paid down one billion dollars in 2024 and has grown EBIT significantly, though Ekert acknowledges substantial work remains. Culturally, he describes Sabre as a "scrappy challenger" today — leaner, more customer-centric, and with exponentially better R&D throughput driven by hunger and disciplined investment.
On the topic of GDS modernization, Ekert pushes back on calls to "blow up" the GDS model, arguing that Sabre has already fundamentally transformed from a mainframe-based system to a cloud-native, modular, AI-infused platform. He notes 99% of Sabre's compute is now in the cloud and that Edifact is just one tile in a larger mosaic that now includes more NDC connectivity than any competitor, low-cost carrier content, and algorithmic shopping powered by AI.
Ekert is direct that offer-and-order delivery — a centerpiece of IATA's NDC roadmap — will take far longer than anticipated. He states the IATA 2030 order mandate is unlikely to be met on schedule, calling it "open heart surgery" for airlines. Most top 20-30 carriers have not committed to a formal order transition. NDC adoption outside OTAs has been slow among brick-and-mortar and TMC agencies, due to the attendant workflow and back-office integration changes required. Ekert expects exponential NDC growth going forward as the industry finally begins collaborating more effectively.
On AI, Ekert compares the coming disruption to the rise of the internet in the mid-to-late 1990s but predicts it will unfold even faster. He reports that Sabre has achieved approximately 15% developer productivity improvement using Google's Gemini and Vertex AI platforms — a tangible near-term ROI. However, for agentic AI specifically, he describes the investment thesis as gut-driven: leadership spends roughly 40% of weekly executive meetings on the topic of agentic AI and has done so for six months. He sees agentic AI emerging as a fundamentally new distribution channel, analogous to how OTAs emerged 30 years ago.
Ekert announces a product called Concierge IQ — an AI conversational commerce layer built on top of Sabre's AI IQ platform — launching in full production with Virgin Australia. The product enables research, search, booking, and post-trip service support within a single conversational experience, deployable via WhatsApp, airline.com, or agency channels.
On distribution disruption, Ekert argues every channel faces disintermediation — supplier direct, OTAs, meta-search, and brick-and-mortar agencies alike. He believes the greatest disruption will come in the Google/Meta flight search segment: airlines currently count that traffic as "direct," but if bookings shift to agentic AI platforms, airlines will lose control of that distribution even if they still capture the transaction. On the look-to-book problem amplified by NDC and further aggravated by agentic AI (which will generate logarithmically more search queries), Ekert argues intelligent caching at petabyte scale is a critical capability — one only a few players in the world can provide — positioning Sabre as a cost-effective distribution layer for both buyers and sellers.
Key Takeaways
- •Sabre paid down $1B in debt in 2024 and has materially grown EBIT, but balance sheet repair is ongoing — investors should not assume the deleveraging story is complete.
- •The IATA 2030 order mandate will not be met on its stated timeline; airlines treating order migration as 'open heart surgery' means true offer-and-order will be a multi-year continuum, not a 2030 event.
- •NDC adoption is accelerating but agencies must invest in workflow, algorithmic shopping, and back-office integration changes — the technology is ready but operational catch-up is the bottleneck.
- •Agentic AI should be treated as a new distribution channel equivalent in significance to the emergence of OTAs — companies must play offense now even without a clear commercial model, because the prize is large.
- •Sabre achieved 15% developer productivity improvement using Google Gemini and Vertex AI — measurable AI ROI is achievable today in the developer tooling layer even while agentic ROI remains uncertain.
- •The biggest distribution disruption in 2026 will be airlines losing control of 'direct' bookings as consumers shift to agentic AI platforms — traffic that currently looks like direct-to-airline.com may migrate into agentic workflows.
- •Intelligent caching at petabyte scale is a critical infrastructure requirement for the agentic era; airlines and agencies that cannot cache NDC responses at low latency will face exponential cost increases.
- •LLM and agentic AI platforms generally want to own the full consumer journey (research through post-trip service) and are unlikely to replicate the Google meta-search advertising model — this creates a genuine opportunity for content and service layer providers like Sabre.
- •Conversational commerce (exemplified by Concierge IQ with Virgin Australia) — enabling booking and servicing in a single AI-driven interaction via WhatsApp or web — is likely to see rapid consumer adoption in 2026.
Transcript
Great to have you back, Kurt. Thank you. >> Thank you, Linda. Great to be here. >> So, you know, you've been here 2024, you were here 2022. So, I want to start with um what we talked about in 2022, which was your tailwinds were some great deals with BCD and Hopper at the time. Your headwinds was debt. How kind of like how much more comfortable do you feel now with the debt level at Saber? >> So, I stepped into the CEO role in 2023. We set out two strategic objectives. One is growth through innov...
