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.
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...
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