Good morning, and welcome to the Sabre First Quarter 2018 Earnings Conference Call. Please note that today's call is being recorded and is also being live over the Internet on the Sabre Corporate website. This broadcast is the property of Sabre. Any redistribution, retransmission or rebroadcast of this call in any form without the expressed written consent of the company is strictly prohibited. I will now turn the call over to the Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications and Investor Relations, Mr.
Barry Sievert. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Melanie, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us for our Q1 2018 earnings call. This morning, we issued an earnings release, which available on our website at investors. Sabre.com. A slide presentation, which accompanies today's prepared remarks, is also available during this call on the Sabre IR webpage.
A replay of today's call, along with the slide presentation, will be available on our website beginning this afternoon. Throughout today's call, we will be presenting certain non GAAP financial measures, which have been adjusted to exclude certain items. All references during today's call to EBITDA, operating income, EPS and net income have been adjusted for these items. The most directly comparable GAAP measures and reconciliations for non GAAP measures are available in the earnings release and other documents posted on our website at investors. Sabre.com.
We would like to advise you that our comments contain forward looking statements. These statements include, among others, disclosures of our guidance, including revenue, EBITDA, operating income, net income, EPS, cash flow and capital expenditures, our expected segment results the effects of changes in accounting standards and U. S. Tax reform the effects of new or renewed agreements, products and implementations, our expectations of industry trends and various other forward looking statements regarding our business. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from the statements made on today's call.
Information containing the risks and uncertainties that could affect our financial results is contained in our SEC filings, including our 2017 Form 10 ks. Participating with me on today's call are Sean Menke, our President and Chief Executive Officer Rick Simonson, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer and Chris Nestor, our Treasurer and SVP of Finance. Sean will start us off and provide a review of our strategic and commercial performance and outlook. Rick will offer additional perspective on our financial results and the forward outlook. We will then open the call to your questions.
With that, I'll turn the call over to Sean.
Thanks, Barry, and good morning, everyone. I'm really glad that you've taken the time to join us today to hear more about our progress and financial results for the Q1. As you might imagine, I'm pretty excited about the kickoff to the year. Good financial results for the quarter and improved expectations for the balance of the year. Not visible to you, but something we have talked about quite a bit is the enormous progress on our stability and product health initiatives.
The tone and content of our conversations with customers has greatly improved and is squarely focused on our strategy, products and their needs. We kicked off the year with significant time spent articulating our strategy and roadmap. It started off with our employees at our Global Leadership Summit where we brought together over 1,000 employees in January. We then brought together you, our investors, as well as analysts that cover us and had our Investor Day that you were able to understand our strategy and focus and get to meet new members of the management team. And then finally, we had our Sabre Technology Exchange just a few weeks ago, where we brought together essentially customers from all parts of our business, both from the hospitality solutions, airline solutions and travel network to talk about all the great things that are going on at Sabre.
We will provide more detail in our prepared remarks. But before we do that, I do want to offer a sincere thank you to my team members throughout the world. Their collective hard work and effort over the past year has been a major contributor to our solid kickoff to the year. I've always believed that strong focus, discipline and execution of a defined strategy and roadmap will pay positive dividends over time. We have made some tough decisions over the past year, but our rigor and accountability are paying off.
Thanks to the foundation we laid in 2017, we began this year's from a solid position and we see momentum gaining. As a leading technology provider, we are partnering closely with our customers to reimagine the business of travel across retailing, distribution and fulfillment. Our cloud first microservices enabled technology strategy is resonating with our customers and our accelerated innovations are delivering appreciable value. We are off to a strong start with solid revenue growth across the business in the Q1. The macro global travel environment was supportive.
This combined with new business wins and implementations drove strong booking growth in Travel Network, a solid increase in passengers boarded on a consistent carrier and airline solutions and continued robust hotel transactions and hospitality solutions. We are progressing well against our prioritized initiatives that are measured, tracked and owned by our leaders and believe we are well positioned to deliver strong full year financial results. Because of this, we are increasing our full year guidance. Now, let's look at our performance in the Q1. We delivered on revenue growth in Q1, strong growth in travel network driven by supportive booking environment, the completion of the Flight Centre migration in Asia Pacific as well as the conversion of other new agency deals that were signed in 2017.
Stronger than expected growth in Airline Solutions with solid passengers boarded growth on a consistent carrier basis, new implementations and the timing of renewals in the quarter. And finally, growth in Hospitality Solutions revenue driven by strong growth in SynXis Software and Services revenue. While operating income declined slightly, free cash flow was well above a year ago levels. All in, a solid quarter. This combined with the momentum we see leads us to increase our financial expectations for the year.
Our progress to date provides clear evidence of 3 things. First, Travel Network and the GDS business model continue to deliver value for customers on both sides of the marketplace. 2nd, Airline Solutions' leading portfolio solutions are focused investments in partnership with the industry are laying the foundation for the stronger growth that we expect in the years ahead. 3rd, Hospitality Solutions is expanding its leadership with innovative new capabilities and increasing scale. In the 2 big addressable markets of independent hoteliers and the large global enterprise brands.
In travel network, carriers of all types and sizes continue to look to our GDS for efficient and high value distribution and we believe full content agreements remain as relevant as ever as the industry continues to evolve. We recently signed long term GDS renewals with United Airlines in North America as well as Aeroplot in EMEA. We are also pleased to announce Lion Air, the 2nd largest low cost carrier in Asia Pacific with over 20% growth in passengers boarded in the Q1 signed its first GDS agreement with us. This new agreement includes GDS exclusivity for Sabre in their home market of Indonesia. As mentioned, we completed the first we completed the Flight Centre conversion in the Q1 with slightly under 1400 locations across Australia and New Zealand, now live on our industry leading new Sabre Red Workspace.
Among other conversions in the Q2, we also fully implemented Trevalhoinho, the 2nd largest OTA in Spain. At Airline Solutions, we expanded our technology footprint at a number of existing customers in the quarter, while executing on major implementations. Etihad, Air China and Virgin Australia all signed agreements for additional Sabre solutions in the quarter and we signed the key renewals at several airlines including Saudi Arabian. Importantly, among numerous implementations in the quarter, we successfully completed the first phase of our SabreSonic reservation system at LATAM and remain on track to complete the implementation by mid year. And just a few days ago, we successfully completed Alaska Airlines and Virgin America's SabreSonic reservation system integration.
At Hospitality Solutions, we continue to extend our lead with new wins in the quarter that included Next Hotels and Resorts and Layla Hotels and Resorts, while expanding our technology footprint across multiple other hoteliers. We completed numerous implementations in the quarter, including the successful migration of Wyndham Brands, American, Howard Johnson's Travelodge to our SynXis central reservation system. We expect to continue to migrate additional Wyndham Hotel Group brands to our CRS throughout the remainder of 2018. At Sabre, our business is solid, momentum is strengthening and our message is gaining traction as we are reimagining the business of travel in order to deliver measurable value to our customers and to deepen and expand our competitive advantages. Our breadth and depth across travel provides us with deep understanding of the travel throughout the travel lifecycle.
There is enormous potential for technology platform at the center of the business of travel to enable the fragmented pieces of Travelers' journey to come together. Given our unique position, we are committed to lead the industry in the development of next generation retailing distribution and fulfillment. Leveraging technologies like AI and machine learning, we believe that data we process and store can be used to create unique offers that reflect real time market dynamics and customer preferences, opening up new revenue opportunities and cost savings for our customers, including through NDC enabled offerings. NDC enabled solutions can unlock product differentiation, quicker time to market, access to rich content and consistent shopping experience across all channels for airlines. We are partnering closely with our airline customers to bring this promise to reality and grow the revenue pie across the ecosystem.
Along with these efforts, at our Sabre Technology Exchange in April, we unveiled our digital airline commercial platform with capabilities unlike anything else available today. This new innovation will begin rolling out in Q4 of this year. Will be in the industry for the end to end intelligence personalized retailing and fulfillment platform. This unique solution features deeper integration and significant capability enhancements to our SabreSonic reservation system and AirVision commercial products, including NDC enabled offer and order management. This innovation will combine the benefits of ultrafast shopping and microservices hub in an omnichannel experience to leverage data driven insights that dynamically and intelligently market airline products across all channels, enable the fulfillment of the resulting order and deliver a personalized customer experience, meaning our airline customers will have a unique edge to truly differentiate in today's competitive environment.
At Travel Network, we are in the midst of a major initiative to upgrade our travel agency customers worldwide to our competitive powerful new desktop and new Sabre Red Workspace. Combined with our leading shopping capabilities, Sabre Red Workspace enables data driven insights from Sabre widgets and APIs to help agents find the right product for customers as well as enhanced options to increase revenue through cross sell and up sell capabilities. The intuitive workflow and consumer grade interface significantly reduced training time for new agents, allowing new hires to reach levels of productivity that used to take years of experience and training. Also announced at Sabre Technology Exchange was the launch of our hospitality solutions, SynXis Property Hub, Property Management solution and next generation updates to our SynXis booking engine and voice agent solutions. Hoteliers are searching for scalable ways to transform the guest experience through technology.
Our brand new SynXis property hub significantly improves how hotel properties run their day to day operation and leverage unique integrated capabilities across the entire SynXis platform in a customer centric mobile optimized design. Our next generation SynXis booking engine uses dynamic personalization to make it easier for travelers to find what they're looking for by display offers and content that is informed by their booking behavior. At our Investor Day in March, we discussed our plan to complete the evolution of our technology infrastructure and architecture to accelerate the advancement of our global travel platform. With years of work already behind us and most of our product portfolio already operating on open systems and deployed in the cloud or cloud ready, we are well on our way. As part of our strategy to move to the cloud as the primary platform for our services, today we announced a multi year global enterprise agreement with Amazon Web Services as one of our strategic cloud partners.
Multiple products from across our business are already hosted on the Amazon cloud. Building on the success, this new agreement deepens our strategic partnership to support our accelerated migration to the cloud, Sabre's primary operating environment. We expect our shift to a cloud first infrastructure will yield significant benefits to us and our customers. We will benefit from increased flexibility and reduced operating costs. While our customers should see enhanced performance, stability, security and time to market benefits for new functionality.
Not only does this new agreement give us preferred pricing in line with the expectations we discussed at Investor Day, but also includes a significant investment by AWS Professional Services and Training to support our continued transition. This is recognition by AWS of Sabre's global leadership position in the fast growing travel technology space. We look forward to continuing to share our progress over the quarters and years to come. With that, I'll turn the call over to Rick to get into more of the financial details. Rick?
Thanks, Sean. Let's move to
the reportable segments. In Q1, Travel Network revenue increased to 9%, driven by strong bookings growth and an increase in average booking fee due to favorable customer pricing and positive mix, including the impact of 20% bookings growth in Asia Pacific, a higher value region. Travel network operating income was impacted by growth in incentive expense, including an unfavorable comparison versus a $16,000,000 incentive contract reversal in the year ago period, as well as increased technology operating costs and higher depreciation and amortization. Bookings growth of 6% reflects the supported macro environment and the benefit of the completion of the Flight Centre migration as well as the conversion of other new agency deals signed in 2017. For the Q1, bookings growth was supported by an increase of 20% in Asia Pacific, driven by the Flight Centre migration and strong market growth.
Bookings also increased 3% in North America, 2% in Europe, Middle East, Africa and were relatively flat in Latin America. Global booking share improved 20 basis points in the first quarter to 36.9%. At Airline Solutions, revenue increased 7%. Within SabreSonic, we saw solid passengers boarded growth on a consistent carrier basis. Air Vision and Air Center Commercial and Operations Solutions revenue increased double digits due to new implementations and earlier than anticipated timing of renewals.
We do not expect to see this level of growth in Airline Solutions to continue over the balance of the year, but we're pleased with the Q1. In the quarter, the net impact of adopting revenue accounting standard ASC 606 was relatively neutral as the impact from revenue timing of renewals and new implementations largely offset the gross revenue reduction driven by the adoption of the new standard. Airline Solutions operating income growth of 56% was supported by benefits from the cost reduction and business alignment program initiated in August 2017, as well as a favorable comparison versus higher service level agreement or SLA expenses in the year ago period. Airline Solutions operating margin expanded nearly 5 points to 14.9%. Passengers boarded declined in the Q1 due to the mid year 2017 roll off of Southwest.
Passengers boarded on a consistent carrier basis increased 6% in the quarter. At Hospitality Solutions, revenue increased 6% in the quarter. We had strong CRS transactions that drove mid teens growth in our SynXis software and services revenue. This was partially offset by a decline in project based digital marketing services revenue. Want to emphasize, we continue to expect full year hospitality revenue growth in the mid teens.
Hospitality Solutions operating income growth was supported by benefits of increasing scale and from cost reduction and business alignment programs initiated in August of last year. In Q1, we generated free cash flow of $130,000,000 a significant increase versus prior year and ahead of expectations. Contributing to free cash flow was decline in capital expenditures of $24,000,000 year over year as our cloud and other initiatives drove a rotation of cost from CapEx to OpEx and as the business becomes less capital intensive as a percentage of revenue. Additionally, Q1 free cash flow growth was positively impacted by the timing of a $40,000,000 DXC payment that was paid in Q1 last year, but will be paid in Q2 this year, as well as receipt of $29,000,000 as the second and final installment of insurance reimbursement settlement related to old litigation. This receipt was incorporated in our original guidance expectations for free cash flow for the year.
Our cash flow supported the continuing strengthening of our balance sheet. We ended the quarter with leverage at 2.9 times. In the quarter, we returned $39,000,000 to shareholders through our regular quarterly dividend. As you've seen, we've raised and increased our 2018 full year guidance today. This is based on strong first quarter, continuing travel transaction growth across our global customer base and our expectations for sustained momentum over the balance of the year.
For the full year, we are increasing our revenue guidance by $75,000,000 We expect revenue of $3,760,000,000 to 3,840,000,000 dollars or 4% to 7% growth. At Travel Network, we expect stronger full year revenue growth of between 6% 8%, above our initial guidance of 4% to 6%. The revenue increase is driven by expectations for bookings to increase 5% to 7%. This is all supported by a strong global macro environment, new agency conversions, the completion of Flight Centre conversion in Asia Pacific as well as revised expectations for approximately 1% average booking fee growth on a full year basis versus our previous expectation for flat booking fee growth. The Q2 is off to a good start with strong bookings performance throughout April.
With a strong Q1 at Airline Solutions, we expect an improvement in revenue growth from previous expectations. Previously, we expected a mid single digit decline in revenue. Now we expect a low single digit decline for the full year. The adoption of new revenue recognition guidance ASC 606 impacts our Airline Solutions reporting as we previously disclosed. Our refined full year estimated impact based on Q1 actuals is as follows.
We see a reduction of full year revenue of $30,000,000 to $40,000,000 or approximately $35,000,000 at the midpoint, which is partially offset by expectations for upside of approximately $10,000,000 driven by upfront revenue recognition for renewals and new implementations of solutions affected by ASC 606. This results in a $25,000,000 estimated net reduction in revenue recognition, which is lower than our previous disclosed estimate of $40,000,000 So reflecting all of the business and accounting ins and outs, we expect airline solutions revenue to decline mid single digits in the second quarter. At Hospitality Solutions, we continue to expect full year revenue growth in the mid teens, fully recognizing Q1 revenue growth was a bit lower than expected for the reasons I mentioned. So turning back to Sabre consolidated level, we are increasing our expectations for full year adjusted EBITDA by $20,000,000 to between $1,075,000,000 $1,115,000,000 for full year adjusted operating income of $15,000,000 increased to between $665,000,000 $705,000,000 As we pointed out on our last earnings call and at our Investor Day, we're increasingly rotating more of our total investment dollars from CapEx to OpEx. Primary drivers of this rotation are accelerating deployment of our private and public cloud environments and productive investment enhancements for stability, security and particularly GDPR compliance here in the early part of the year.
This continuing rotation dampens the flow through from the top line revenue growth to EBIT and operating income. We expect depreciation and amortization of approximately $410,000,000 interest of approximately $155,000,000 and effective tax rate of approximately 25 excuse me, 24 percent for the full year. This results in updated adjusted net income guidance of approximately $385,000,000 to $425,000,000 and adjusted EPS guidance of $1.39 to 1 $0.53 We continue to expect capital intensity as a percent of revenue to decline and are lowering our full year CapEx forecast by $15,000,000 resulting in a range of $290,000,000 to $310,000,000 Our increased earnings outlook and decline in CapEx expectations resulted in an increase in our full year free cash flow outlook to approximately $425,000,000 representing a $35,000,000 improvement versus previous expectations and year over year growth of approximately 18%. In terms of quarterly cadence, we expect free cash flow to be a bit lower in Q2 and closer to the Q1 run rate in Q3 and Q4. Sean, back to you for closing remarks.
Great. Thanks, Rick. As earlier discussed, I am pleased with how we kicked off the year, as you can hear. I have challenged our team to reimagine the business of travel and I want to commend them once again for their hard work and commitment that is driving tangible results for this company. Together, we are accelerating innovation and unlocking value for our customers.
We are progressing well against the prioritized initiatives we introduced at Investor Day. These results provide a strong start for us to build off of over the balance of the year. I want to once again thank all of you for joining us today. And at this time, we'd like to go ahead and open up the call for your questions. Melanie?
Thank We'll take our first question from Mark Moerdler with Bernstein
color on what offerings are you planning to move to AWS? How much of the overall data center requirements are going to move to being running in the cloud on a over a longer horizon? And then a quick follow-up.
Yes. Hey, Mark, this is Rick. On AWS, again, it's one of our providers. It's a non exclusive agreement, but a very strategic one. We had started with them of moving some of our product from our hospitality into the AWS cloud.
We'll continue to rotate those solutions that are cloud ready, open systems, increasingly to AWS, understanding we complement that by our data centers, our co locations where we've already moved all of our shopping into those 2 data centers that are located in North Texas here. So again, this is a continuation of rotation from out of small SABR managed data centers and increasingly from the DXC data centers in Tulsa to virtual or private cloud or public cloud operations. AWS is just the first step in that rotation and it spans applications across hospitality, airline solutions and the travel network. We've got a very clear plan of what data centers will continue to shut down and what applications will continue to rotate to AWS and other partners to come.
Beautiful. Thank you. And then
as a follow-up, with the shift to cloud providers in general, optically, how should we think about CapEx going forward? Should we figure directionally it's going to continue to creep down as workloads move or future growth?
Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's as we talked at the end of the year and we spoke a lot at our Investor Day and again as a percentage of revenue, the CapEx is going down from closer to 9% to into the 8% and lower as we talked about before. And that's the primary driver there. You get all the benefits of we can have continuous availability by the way we set up and deploy across the different locations.
It saves capital there in terms of what you need for capacity. We use on demand capacity for peak applications that might have very different intensity of usage during the day, during the week, during the quarter and the year. So you get all of those benefits and we're already starting to recognize that.
Beautiful. Thank you.
And we'll go next to Matthew Broome with Cowen and Company.
Thanks for taking my call. So it sounds like you now expect to get a bit more travel network pricing in the year. Can you speak to the sort of competitive landscape during the quarter? And I guess across all through to your business segments if that's possible?
Yes, Matthew, this is Rick. On Travel Network, we said about flat pricing this year. We're raising that by a percentage. There's a number of drivers there. One is the mix of growth in the regions I talked about specifically in Q1 you see the strong APAC growth, which is a higher margin market.
We expect to see continued higher than average growth out of APAC. So that contributes 1st and foremost our mix and we have gotten benefit from some of the rotation that's going on with some of the legacy carriers in the European market on pricing.
Okay, great. And I guess air vision and air center saw some sort of nice reacceleration in the quarter. Is this sort of largely a factor of lapping sort of easier comps? Or are you actually seeing sort of a more meaningful kind of inflection in demand for these products?
Well, remember as we've talked, there's good demand for our products in air center and air vision And we've talked about that of demand of on a consistent basis, teens growth in air center and air vision. We're having the difficult comparisons of lapping on our central reservations from the exit of Southwest as you're well aware. But AirVision, AirCenter, very strong on our operations suite, the demand for those products. What we've done is been working to make sure that we've improved our efficiency of delivering those, narrowing down the versions that Dave Shirk talked about in terms of the customer that helps with customer stability, it helps with quality of that. So that benefits us all throughout our operational efficiency, but the demand is absolutely there across air vision, air center.
Intelligence Exchange is our lead data and analytics product in air vision. There's nothing like it on the marketplace. That's a big driver there. And our whole crew suite in air center, again, good demand for that. So we're really pleased with the momentum that we have in that.
We have a lot of ins and outs going on, on the revenue accounting, but you shouldn't confuse any of that or the lapping or the comp with the Southwest departure with the fundamental demand for the products in AirCentre and AirVision. In hospitality, we had a little bit lower growth than expected in the Q1, but importantly that was really a function of lower of the project based kind of episodic digital marketing work. Again, that's not the core of our business. It's necessary and a complement to what we offer. But the core transaction growth is driven off of our central reservations and will increasingly start to come off of our property management, property managers, SynXis Hub was very strong in the quarter and that's what gives us confidence that through the full year we still expect to see low teens revenue growth in the Hospitality Solutions business.
So hopefully that gives you a little color by the 3 segments.
Yes. And I'll add a couple of things because I think it goes back to the work that has taken place within airline solutions really over the last year, year and a half. And part of it was what we were doing just really from a product health perspective. We've made some changes as it relates to leadership and customer care and delivery. That has been very helpful as we continue to integrate specifically, our group, software to different carriers throughout the world.
So that continues moving forward. As Rick stated, the pipeline there is strong. The other thing I want to point out and it was in my comments was really the digital commerce platform. And this goes back to what the team announced during the Sabre Technology Exchange. And this is really beginning to marry what we're talking about relative to the transition in the marketplace, because everybody is very interested in PSS deals.
And as we travel the world and we're meeting customers around the world, they look at NDC and they look at ways of actually driving more revenue, this is where the rubber sort of hits the road in the transition. And part of that is what we're looking at as it relates to dynamic pricing, which gets into fair optimizer, which is one of the products we have as well as dynamic availability. The other is what we're doing on the digital agent interface because this really allows to drive more exception handling, but probably more importantly, allows agents and airport personnel to drive more ancillary sales and how do we actually do that with a better interface that's out there. The other piece is the offer and order management and that has become fundamental as it relates to looking at NDC and NDC capabilities. How do you look at that offer and order management and that gets rolled into this.
And the last piece that I'll talk about on this is really as we talk about microservices and you look the multiple components of a PSS, it allows us to make the changes at different points in time that it's just not one big release. We can look at a specific component and make those changes. So again, I feel really good about what we're seeing in Airline Solutions. There's more work to be done. But if you look at where we were a year ago, the progress that has been made and essentially how we're bringing all these pieces together, pretty excited about the opportunities as we look into the future.
Very interesting. Thanks and congrats on the results.
We'll go next to Jim Schneider with Goldman Sachs.
Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. It was helpful what you the discussion around travel network trends. From a macro perspective, do you think that the bookings momentum that we've seen early in the year can kind of sustain itself? And can you remind us of any kind of easier comps we may have seen in the first half of last year that would kind of skew the growth numbers as we look for the balance of the year?
Jim, the bookings is pretty clear. We are off to and the industry is off to a good Q1. We've seen that continued in April. It's fundamental to our outlook for the year and our which was strong going into the year and fundamental to the raise that is attributed to the stronger bookings this year. We're doing our part by making sure we're doing and getting the benefit of conversions that we worked on in 2017, leading with the product of the new Sabre Red workstation, etcetera.
Our continuing growth in Europe, Middle East, Africa market where that's our smallest footprint. So it's pretty simple story. We see a good year forming up on bookings. We're doing our part to make sure that we're getting our fair share of that. And no, there aren't any things to really call out in the back half.
Yes. I mean, we continue to watch as everybody does what's happening on the capacity side with carriers throughout the world. The Lion Air thing is important. This is something that we've seen really over the last year that we I think we signed up 10 to 12 low cost carriers around the world. Part of it is those that are fast growing and looking for other forms of distribution that becomes more important.
So as we look at where we are right now, look at what's taking place, we feel really good about the trends. And even though you've heard
some bits of airlines might trim a little bit capacity, that's really at the edges. There's plenty of capacity to support the growth expectations that we see for this year.
That's encouraging to hear. And then maybe relative to the airline solutions, I know you mentioned some renewals and maybe some other issues that kind of contributed strength in Q1. Is that something that can kind of continue at least into Q2 a little bit? And can you maybe comment on the relative strength of the operations solutions versus central res, please?
Yes. In terms of the renewals and again, there's a big component that in Q1 contributed to upfront loading of revenue of locally installed software, the license component of that. We've talked about this pretty much at length of the impact of 606. We don't expect that to continue at that rate in Q2. And that's specifically why I called out the Q2 growth rate where we usually don't do that by revenue segment, so that we can all be aligned to that.
And overall, gave you the updates there.
Makes sense. Thank you.
We'll go next to Ashish Sabadra with Deutsche
Bank. Solid results, congrats. My question was about the private channel deals in Europe, Air France KLM moved on to it. I was just wondering if you can talk about what you're seeing in the market and how is that going to influence or how is that going to impact or be beneficial to Sabre?
Yes, I'll go ahead and tackle this one. I think it's important because we do get a lot of questions about the agreements and what's going on. And first, let's sort of break it up into what we're seeing in the U. S. Marketplace, the European marketplace, and then touch upon the low cost carriers.
In North America, as I just stated in our comments, we just renewed our agreement with the United Airlines, long term agreement with United Airlines. That's on top of a renewed agreement with Delta Airlines last year. The one thing that I will share as it relates to American Airlines is we have been in discussions with them and have brought really a cross section of team members together from American as well as Sabre to assess what is really a win win agreement that is broad and all encompassing. And that level of engagement between the two organizations has been very productive. And it's really thinking about the future technology leads.
A lot of the things that we are talking about as it relates to the transformation of the business, it's important to be able to have those discussions with key partners and that cooperation has from my point of view has been good to this point. So you have that context in North America that we have full content agreements and engage with one of our largest partners. If you look at Europe, it's a little bit different, right? And we've seen 3 carriers or groups, IAG, Lufthansa, as well as Air France KLM. And the one thing that we continue to point out is if you look at over the last year, I think we signed essentially 40 full content agreements.
So you have a microcosm of changes that are taking place there. As we look at the marketplace and I think this is when you look at our share, our share is in that 16% to 17% range in Europe. And the interesting thing that when you look at the profile of our bookings, a little under half of them are really the high yielding international traffic that's out there. And that's really important to international carriers because it's the higher yielding traffic that's out there. The one thing that and I don't know if people that are listening actually had read the story in the company Dime, but it's something that we have talked about as it relates to just understanding history history and also understanding sort of the progression of what happens when carriers try to move from indirect to direct.
And that article really did point out some of the things that we had stated over the past several months is that when you look at the 1st full year post surcharge from Lufthansa, you saw about a 10% movement in 10 point movement in the indirect to direct. But thereafter, it has been relatively flat. And it's something that I've always talked about just based on my experience in doing this at Air Canada is that from a strong point of sale perspective, you can actually have movement. But when you look at how you're trying to move bookings and less and point of sales that are less strong or you're looking at it relative to the alignment with the travel management companies, it becomes a little bit more difficult. So we'll continue to see how things play out with IAG and Air France KLM.
But it's important and again, I'm going to reference just a little history is that when you do go back to Air Canada and this is information that can be tracked is that each of these situations is rather unique, but Air Canada made a decision in 2006 that they were going to go to the rack rate PCA. And at that point in time, the lower fares, which were the Tango branded fares were actually pulled from the marketplace. And despite remaining on the PCA, what we saw over a period of time is that Air Canada returned the full content to the GDS. And if you look at GDS share pre that action and then post that action, there was only about a 5 point movement in what GDS share was. And if you actually look at our bookings, this is Sabre bookings pre to post, so pre-two 1006 to what we're seeing right now, had about a 50% increase in actually booking.
So, the important thing in all of this is even though I go through these stats, it's important to note that our customers are looking at ways of driving additional revenue. And when you look at retailing distribution and fulfillment and how that really ties back to how we're looking at our travel network business, how we're looking at airline solutions and the enablement is to help them find ways of driving that additional revenue to compete in the marketplace.
That's extremely helpful. Maybe just a quick follow-up question on the hospitality side. We should continue to see some pretty good acceleration in the growth And just want to highlight, if you could highlight what will drive that acceleration in the growth as we go through the year? And then the second point would be just on the prospect pipeline, if you could talk about the prospect pipeline for the hospitality solution? Thanks.
Yes, sure, Ashish. Fundamental, the growth is driven by our global leading footprint in central reservations transactions with the independent hoteliers. As we said, we're the leader there. We've been at this for some time. We have an offering that isn't matched by anybody else.
It's a community, you know SaaS offering, a single instance multi tenant deploying from the cloud and the market is a long, long way from saturated there. Again, you have 100 and 1000 of hoteliers who are operating 10, 20, 40, 50 properties, who are using either ancient legacy closet even. They have variations of local homegrown by people who have developed software for them in the market. And what they're finding is the benefits that we can add in terms of their revenue management is terrific and we can do it in an offering that keeps them current. And we just have a lot of opportunity across the globe in going to sell additional capabilities to existing customers, 1, but also just filling in and including in our U.
S. Market. But as we said, we can continue to grow our mix in rest of the world in the fast growing Asia Pacific market and in the very fractured European market with the independent hoteliers. That's complemented by the growth that we expect to come from the enterprise there. And I think there, again, as we've talked, it's episodic there with central reservation and our limited service property management.
These are very big decisions for the top 20 hotelier brands, a little bit more like when airlines are thinking about a reservation system change. But again, the important thing is there we're the only offering in the market that's tested, that's scalable, that's quality assured on enterprise grade central reservations and are the only one with a modern kind of current software solutions for property management with our SynXis system. So again, we're in robust discussions with customers there and as we said, that's going be part of our growth. But the first one was with independent hoteliers. And let me add a couple
of things, because I think it helps in understanding, again, just referencing back to what we talked about at the Sabre Technology Exchange and what's happening within the Hospitality Solutions Group. And this really does get into the new property hub. And to build off of what Rick was talking about, sort of the siloed piece that's out there is, when you look at the deployment of the new PMS system that we'll be rolling out, it's really hosted above the premises, right? So when you look at the branded hoteliers that are out there, that information has essentially on a customer has been isolated to that specific property. This takes it above.
It actually can be shared across what's taking place. The other thing is the alignment as it relates to the central reservation system as well as the PMS has been rather clunky for all that are out there. And this actually brings that all together. And what ends up happening is that if you look historically, there has been a replication that takes place from the CRS to the PMS. What happens now because we've integrated these as we roll it out, there's a single instance, so there's no replication that takes place.
So again, really good information about customers and being able to use that across different across the brand, hoteliers. So again, it's important to get into some of the real details on what's taking place, which gets into where we have conversations with the enterprise as well as the independent hoteliers is understanding what this does for them as they continue to compete in the marketplace for travelers.
Sean, I think with that, as people understand how you've talked about how we deploy above, the premise and the benefits of that one, a really important one that's resonating is how effective it is for getting the front desk staff up to speed and the staff on the property. Again, hotels face a turnover rate of I think is it about 100% a year or over. And on things that they before taken months to become proficient with right before they leave, We've really lifted that above to where we get people up and running in a matter of days weeks by comparison to what used to be many months and we put it to mobile with SynXis Property Hub where staff that are working throughout the hotel can work off of a smartphone and iPad any kind of mobile device and be connected into this integrated data that Sean was referring to. So that's a huge thing in terms of training and effectiveness of staff that is high turnover in that business.
Thanks a lot, Sean and Rick, and congrats once again on the solid quarter.
We'll go next to Matt Pfau with William Blair. One moment please.
Hello, Matt, are you there?
I apologize. It's taking just a moment. And your line is now open.
Hey, guys. Can you hear me now?
Yes.
Okay. Sorry, I think the operator had some issues getting me in. But thanks for taking my questions and wanted to ask a follow-up on the hospitality segment. So I guess I'm trying to understand the digital marketing services component and I guess why it will impact the Q1, but perhaps not throughout the rest of the year. So are you expecting a rebound or was this component of revenue something that was unique to the Q1?
It was exacerbated in the Q1. You look at that on a year over year and a sequential comp. And so we think that will be more mitigated there. Also we're going through some revamp of that offering and how we're deploying there and taking the learnings of what we've done to make sure that as much as possible it's complementary to our offerings and more scalable. It's a business that you really put primarily it's been where you put people at it who are experienced in that and understand the vertical deeply.
And we've been working to find ways to complement that expertise of the digital expert in hospitality and scale that a bit more. So in coming into the year, our expectations, we knew that we would have a little bit of this to the comps to fight through and also looking at the ways that we're working to make sure that this is scalable and has the right kind of return. Understanding as we talked before, this is a low return business compared to our transaction, our software and SaaS business. But very much a necessary component to deliver that true offering and total offering to the hotelier. So we do expect it to rebound a bit throughout the year here.
Got it. And then just last for me on FX. Do you have the impact on the FX impact on revenue growth rate in the quarter? And then any changes did FX have any changes to your guidance for the full year? Thanks.
No, Matt. It hasn't been material. And so, no, I don't have the detail on that because it wasn't one of the drivers.
Great. Thanks guys. And we'll
go next to John King with Merrill Lynch.
Hey, good morning. Congrats on the quarter from my side. I've got, I guess, 4 relatively quick ones. The first one was the first two, in fact, are on the guidance. I'm sorry if I missed these, but maybe, Rick, you could talk to it, the free cash flow upgrade.
Obviously, the CapEx has been lowered, driving some of that. What is the reason for the lower CapEx? Is there something you've decided not to do or just better efficiency? The second one on the guidance was around the profit flow through. Obviously, it seems like we've got €25,000,000 of incremental revenue from 606 accounting change.
Presumably that also did that flow pretty much through to EBITDA. And if that's the case, obviously, the EBITDA raise, in fact, the EBITDA is slightly down like for like. So maybe just talk about the flow through of incremental revenue into profitability. And then maybe I'll ask the next two after you've answered those.
Okay. Yes. Free cash flow upgrade, John. Yes, we said we expect that to increase by to $425,000,000 and that's up from up $35,000,000 from our previous range, primarily driven by the items that I mentioned flow through and the lower capital intensity. So the CapEx intensity is driven by, as I mentioned, our continuing rotation of products deployed to the cloud and not buying the computers, the servers to have ready at peak capacities.
The way that you can buy that to buy the drink is very important and just getting the benefit of scale and the computing power on an actual data processing cost. So those two things help us there. And then overall, as we've said, our intensity of the driven down in above and beyond the rotation that's due to the deployment to cloud and you're seeing the benefit of that here in the year. And we brought down our CapEx further by $15,000,000 and now the full year guidance is $305,000,000 to $325,000,000 In terms of the flow through, I think your question was on 606, how do we look at this is, ex 606, we had a revenue increase of about $60,000,000 right, because we had $15,000,000 less of the impact of loss of revenue. So that's that.
And then how does that kind of flow down? If you apply kind of a normal gross margin on that 40%, you'd lose $36,000,000 of that flow through. As we said, the CapEx rotation put $15,000,000 more in OpEx versus CapEx. So that's an additional lack of flow through of the $15,000,000 dollars D and A has increased by about $5,000,000 We have assets quicker into service there. And so that gets you pretty close to just a little bit or a flat flow through down to the op inc.
You're correct there. But the point is, overall, we are reducing our capital intensity as a percentage of the growing revenue. We've increased our revenue even adjusted for 606 based on strong transactional growth across the three businesses. We've increased EPS by 0 point 5 dollars and we've increased the free cash flow to approximately $425,000,000 or an 18% growth year on year.
That's helpful. And then the 2 final ones were on, first of all, on the bookings performance, obviously, a good performance. Did you see any impact at all? I was actually expecting some negative impact from Easter. So maybe you could comment on what you saw from that standpoint.
And then finally, I think, Sean, you mentioned a renewal on American Airlines, which is good to hear. Is that also goes for the PSS side or is that just on the travel network? Thank you.
Yes. So Easter was 16, 17 days earlier. It had a point impact of the slowdown that goes ahead of Easter. We expect that to recover in the current quarter. So that was the impact in the quarter, John.
And then, what I announced was a renewal agreement with United Airlines, not American. But what I was commenting on is just the engagement with American and what's taking place, just as a clarification.
Got it. Thank you for that.
We'll go next to David Tuohy with Evercore ISI.
Thank you. Good morning. Could you comment on the rate of growth in travel agency incentives in the travel network business and compare that to the 9% growth you saw in revenue?
Yes, David. This is Rick. We had growth of incentives in the quarter. And again, that contributed to the pressure on the margins and the lack of the flow through that I talked about. Also the negative comp from the incentive true up where we recognized $16,000,000 in the previous years.
Those were the two negatives. We got a bit better on price and we had more flow through. So, yes, there's still incentives growing. But again, that's at the rate that we anticipated and we talked about coming into the year. So was there anything different in the dynamics in Q1 on incentives growth?
No, supportive of looking at how that dynamic is going to work across the rest of the year. Supportive of looking at how that dynamic is going to work across the rest of the year, able to raise our expectations for both revenue and bookings growth and a little bit of price net price growth for Travel Network.
If you strip out the year ago item, the $16,000,000 incentive contract reversal in Q1 of 'seventeen, what would be the apples to apples growth rate in travel agency incentives year over year?
We haven't gone through those details and don't generally give out the by agencies or regions what the incentive growth are. So I prefer not to do that here on this conference call.
Well, at the overall level, not by client or region, but overall was travel agency incentive growth higher than revenue in the quarter?
No, it was about even there, so you can see then how we get to the math there. So no, it's not higher than revenue
growth. Understood. And then could you comment on the pipeline for the airline solutions business, either demand to buy add on solutions and or full outsourcing of IT by airlines?
In the commentary, I'll start and then Sean, as I mentioned, we have very good demand for our air vision, our air center products that form the basis of what we talked about that we expect adjusting for 606 double digit increases in revenue for those products across the year, we're having to get past the anniversary of the loss of Southwest on the reservation side and that's what contributes to the overall impact in slower sales in the business. So the demand for those products is strong. On the reservation side, SabreSonic, again, those deals episodic and we have the cut over that we're working phase of that. It's on track and we expect to get the benefit of that in the back of the year. I think the maybe Sean you want to again touch on some of the benefits of our new product suite, which really gets at that we announced at our Sabre Technology Exchange that really gets at of how customers are increasingly looking at taking additional software products and integrating and getting the benefit of what we call the Connected Airline 2.0.
Yes.
I mean, I'm just going to reference back to the comments that I had earlier relative to the breakdown when you look at it. We continue to see the strength in the air center side of the equation, specifically crew. One of the things that we have focused on is just improving the deployment and deployment capabilities of our delivery and care group. And we have that happening under new leadership on the AirVision side and merchandising, intelligence exchange continue to be very good. On the PSS side, a big part of the conversation has been really the alignment as it relates to what's happening on the distribution side and how do you drive that into the PSS system.
And as I walked through just a little bit ago on the details of that, that is essentially the foundation of number of the conversations that are taking place in the marketplace. And a lot of those components of what we talk about are going to be rolling out in Q4 of this year. So, it's probably what I'm enjoying right now and it's interesting is the level of discussions with airlines around the world on what does NDC mean? How does this actually transition or translate into their capability of driving additional revenue or the opportunity of putting essentially new offers out there. And with that, the one thing that I think I would like to highlight or I will highlight is part of this is what I see us as being a really leader and a driver and making sure people completely understand the impact of what this means, not only just on how do you sell the product, but also how you fulfill the product, which does get into the PSS.
Quick final question, with the reduction in the CapEx outlook to 8% of revenue from 9%, how will you be spending that incremental capital as divided between dividend, buyback, repurchase and acquisitions?
Yes, David, no different than what we've had in the priority and articulated at our Investor Day. It's first to invest all that you can productively in the organic growth of the business. And then we have our dividend, which the target range is set. We would expect that to grow with net income. Then we look to share repurchases to offset our modest for a technology company share dilution and then it's toggle between opportunistic buyback and M and A and that's right where we are and we do have excess free cash flow.
We continue to return it in the form of dividend. We accelerated some buybacks here in the RASK food quarters to take advantage of what we saw was a good price and value creation. We'll continue to look to do that. We've got our authorization for the multi year share buyback program and we'll use both programmatic buyback to execute on the rather small amount that we need to do to offset the dilution and we'll look to them opportunistically deploy there. But again, it's a toggle with select M and A, nothing different there.
Understood. Thank you very much.
Good. Thanks.
We'll go
next to Abhi Lamba with Mizuho Securities.
Yes. Thank you. This is Parthav on for Abhay. Most of my questions have been asked, but just with respect to recent technology investments, you talked about this briefly in your prepared remarks, but could you give us an update there how efficiency metrics are trending? Anything incremental on that front since the Analyst Day that you'd like to share?
Well, I think this rig is just continuation of what we talked about. I think it is really good to share at Investor Day that the majority of our solutions are on open systems. Deployment of those that are cloud ready to the cloud and we get the benefit as we've talked about in terms of operating efficiency in terms of capacity and how to manage that for peak capacity most efficiently, continuous availability for stability to the customers. So again, we benefit in many different ways the metrics on terms of our we didn't have service level outages at that level that we did previous. We've put that emphasis across the network and that's benefiting us the data processing costs, our costs of shopping and how we manage the look to book ratio, all of those are proceeding as we outlined at Investor Day and we're seeing the benefit of that.
And that allows us to reduce our CapEx outlook while our revenue grows. Then specifically partnering with key strategic partners, it was fantastic to announce the AWS partnership here. We've been using them, but importantly as we talk in the announcement there, we really get the benefits of the finest pricing in this agreement, which of course is important for our global size and we have the road plan to scale up with them, but it's a non exclusive agreement. But they their reflection of investing to help us with some professional services and implementation and advisory work, I think is testament to their belief that they're picking to partner with the travel technology leader on a global basis.
Understood. Thanks for the color, Rick.
And we'll go next to Jed Kelly with Oppenheimer.
Great. Thanks for taking my question. Can you talk about sort of some of the reacceleration you saw in the North American region? Was it driven more by leisure, more by business or any share gains with the OTAs?
I think we had 3% booking growth in North America and pretty much business as usual. So there is no color this quarter on that other than good solid growth 3%. Okay.
I mean the one thing
that we have seen, I will add one thing. I mean if we continue to look at just corporate travel, corporate travel continues to improve. If we look at brick and mortar just growth on a global basis, it has been good and a lot of that does go back to just the corporate side of the equation. So that continues to be an encouraging sign.
Okay. And then on the mid teens hospitality outlook, do you expect that to come more from existing properties or new properties? How should we think about that?
Well, the teams revenue growth supported by this transaction again is in stall base and growth in the independent hoteliers primarily.
And we have the continued roll on of the Wyndham properties that will continue to convert throughout the year. So again same dynamics that we've talked about there, Jed.
All right. And then just one more, I guess, big picture question. You're sort of seeing a lot of this fragmented vacation rental inventory and some of the OTAs try to accelerate this online, but the technology seems pretty fragmented. How do you think about potential acquisitions in the vacation rental space?
Let me talk just broader relative to bringing that content forward. And it's something that we've done on the hospitality side as it relates to the platform that the team has just rolled out. And as you look at hospitality and how essentially it is aggregated, it's aggregated in a number of different ways. And that has been our focus is on how do we pull in. And you could have a same property that has multiple different prices that are out there.
And as we look into the future, it's how do we continue to build off of that and what are the capabilities that we can move content into that platform. And one of those options into the future is the space that you had just talked about. So that team continues to look at options of bringing that content forward.
We'll go next to Brian Essex with Morgan Stanley.
Great. Thank you for taking my question and congrats on the quarter. Ed, just maybe Sean, real quick question for you is we look out at the pipeline of, I guess, PSS deals into like 2020, 2021, that's when you still really start to see a large amount of deals. I mean, there's kind of a in your pocket of or lack of deals over the next year or so, but you really start to see a big ramp in 2020, 2021. Any sense of how you're thinking about that?
Are you starting to have conversations with some of those vendors? And is your ability to sit on top of both direct and indirect platforms, I guess, do you think that would give you a meaningful advantage, particularly a good number of these deals or even a few large ones are vendors like pros or in house or bulletproof and vendors that don't have both direct and indirect exposure?
Yes. So when you look and you're correct, as you look into the future, there's definitely more deals that come up. We are engaged with a number of airlines throughout the world. And part is we've articulated our strategy as it relates to the fundamentals of retail and distribution and fulfillment, you have to look at that indirect and direct side. And the thing that I have always thought about in leading this organization is how do you bring all those together?
Because when you're sitting inside the airline, you have to think about the multiple components of how am I going to sell my products and services. And that's going to be through the indirect and direct channel. And how do you make sure that when you do that, that the 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars that they're investing in product are essentially being put on the shelf properly. One thing that we are doing when we look at this in our engagement is how do we make sure that we're looking at it more from a sales perspective of bringing AS and TN together because we can leverage both sides of what's there. You then drive into the revenue management piece of this, right, because it becomes very important when you start looking at your availability and how things begin to change, how do you look at it from the revenue optimization side.
And again, that is sort of the next step in what happens and then you drive into the PSS itself. So there's just multiple components. And this is where when we sit with carriers around the world and trying to articulate it to you as well as others is you have to understand each of these facets and how they connect. And the underlying work that we are doing right now, I am very confident that we are going down the right path to be able to do this because I sat in this chair for a number of years on the airline side of the equation on how do you try to fulfill these things. And we are digging into the root needs and causes that will allow them to essentially sell their products and services the way that they want.
But this does cause and services the way that they want. But this does cause some questions that they have to address at the same time. So again, I think we are at a very interesting point because it really relies on technology, technology changes, but it unleashes capability for our customers. And the other flip side of this is, and I don't want to lose sight of this, because we have this tendency to talk about more of the airline side of the equation, the hospitality side. The important piece is how are we driving this all the way to our other partners and that's on the agency side because they have to sell those products and services and we can't lose sight of that that we have to look at that entire value flow of products and services being essentially put up and then sold be it through the direct channel or the indirect channel and making sure that our agency partners also have the capabilities.
And this really does get into Sabre Red Workspace and what we're doing and why we're thinking about the other advancements that need to take place relative to those types of tools.
And is there any way to think about how you're approaching the re platforming of your infrastructure and what access that's going to give you either to visibility into data or ownership of the data that might help you on the analytics side to provide those insights to each of those channel partners?
Yes. So there's multiple ways you can look this, right. 1, it gets into the shopping data and understanding essentially what's happening on the shopping side of the equation. And we see that just from a base perspective today. I think the more interesting thing as you look into it, and I think this is going to become more carrier specific is, as we look at that base fare and how that has been revenue optimized, that has been pretty much the same for a long period of time.
But when we start getting into the ancillaries and what carriers can learn, and I also throw this into the hospitality side of when you're looking at ancillaries or you're looking at branded products and bringing those together, you have to be able to have movement in those prices to understand the elasticity and that data comes out. And in doing that, it will give them the capability of understanding certain price points and what's going to drive and it does get into actually time of day. So again, as you can see, I'm pretty excited about this because it does allow our customers to look at how do you revenue optimize more and it's taking really the skill sets that they already have and how do we expand that into the future.
Good stuff. Thank you.
And we'll go next to Adam Haakkel with Imperial.
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the time here. Great start to the year. Question on Alaska with the cut over recently. Obviously, that wasn't really part of the solid Q1, I mean, it just happened.
They also announced a SABR fair, as they call it, which I swear it sounded like SABR fair, sort of their basic economy equivalent. I'm just wondering what sort of factored in on your airline solutions guidance for the year for those guys? And what sort of how early are we still here in terms of revenue optimizing for those guys?
So this is Rick with the Alaska version. Yes, they came together. They cut the airlines together. They had their last Virgin flight and we are the reservation provider for both of those. And so we handled that with them.
It's done very well. I don't believe there were any glitches at all. And so that's terrific. That's in keeping with how we do that. They did announce what's equivalent to the so called basic economy fares that have been rolled out by United, America and Delta, Alaska announced that.
You're right, it allows them to sell in their case the back end of the cabin only at a lower fare without frills to compete with the Frontiers and the Spirit similar to what the other big three that I mentioned do. I guess one difference that I noticed in there is was you can actually make a seat reservation where you can't on the other 3, but it has to be in the last rows where on the other 3 anywhere in the economy cabin you might end up sitting, but you can't make a reservation if you want that lowest fare. So that's what's happening there. And again, they're a terrific partner for us. And we're pleased that the 2 of them come together.
We did a lot of innovation around the customer experience tools with Virgin when we worked with them and we look forward to seeing how Alaska and Virgin integrate those and others of the data and analytics that Sean has referred to here.
And the one thing that's taken place with them too is if you look at the if you look at actually the 2 carriers come together, we continue to see good capacity growth in that 5% to 6% range and sort of expect that going forward.
Great.
And just last one for me. Obviously, a lot of news headlines on Southwest given that the unfortunate accident they just had a couple of weeks ago and they had to sort of shut off their marketing for a couple of weeks after that. And it sounds like that hurt their bookings quite a bit. Obviously, they're the last sort of big guy in the U. S.
That's not in the GDS. Does that give you guys any ammunition just seeing the impact just having Southwest shut off their marketing for a week or 2, the impact on their bookings given they're 100% direct on top of obviously the value you guys bring on the corporate side and so on?
Yes. I mean, 1st and foremost, that was an unfortunate situation. And we definitely think about the people impacted with that. But if you look at it, Southwest has had a model that has been focused on the direct side of the equation. We've often thought that there's opportunities to expand more in the GDS, but that's one that we'll continue to engage with Southwest.
And hopefully, over a period of time, they would migrate more onto the GDS. But again, the model for them has been on the direct side.
Great. Thank you very much guys.
Thanks Adam.
And we'll go next to Dan Wlasiuk with Morningstar.
Good morning, guys. So in your prepared remarks, when you talked about gaining momentum with customers, specifically on the Red Workspace product, where it seems you have a differentiated product there. Have you seen the last couple of months a pickup there and request for proposals? Are you talking with increasingly more agents or more agents looking at that product? Just kind of any kind of color that you might be able to give on that specific product?
Thank you.
Hey, this is Rick. We have a desktop with all of our agents. This is the new version of it. So it actually kind of just rolls out and it isn't we don't have to wait for a request for proposal for instance. So that's a differentiation there, but we are going through that in a thoughtful manner of the agencies that are ready and geographies as we've talked about and we really do believe it sits on top of the Sabre platform and is we believe the most versatile and agency friendly efficient booking tool that we provide.
And again, it's a lot to do with how we can make their workflow most efficient first and foremost. And then secondly, how we're opening that up to bring the different bundles or unbundled or bundled offerings that airlines want to deliver. So airlines have told us very clear and as part of our strategy, we want to sell retail brand the way we want to and we want our direct channel to look as much as possible look and feel like the indirect channel through the GDS. But you have to then get up to the realities of how do you fulfill that and how do you meet the needs of the corporate customer as Sean has pointed out many times. We're the ones that are bridging that.
The Sabre Red Workspace is a key tool there. So, we've got good momentum in the rollout of that and we'll continue to get the
benefit. And so you have that piece of it that Rick is talking about, which is the existing customers and those that continue to transition over to the new Sabre Red Workspace. The other thing that is out there, I think gets to your question, is it helping from a pipeline perspective? Flight Centre and now that have essentially Australia and New Zealand on board. There's a lot of really good stats that are coming out relative to what we keep talking about.
And the ability to continue to put information in front of our customers as it relates to the performance and what's taking place. And we have to be sensitive because some of this is flight center information and it's their information. But we're able to really be able to show the capability of what the product does. And in doing that, as we continue to add the enhancements, as Rick was talking about, I think there's, again, a lot of opportunities to continue to convert customers throughout the world.
So we use that tool to compete for customers we don't have or we have a minority share and we want to grow it. But the ones that are already up and running will we just convert them.
Okay. Thanks guys and congrats on the strong start to the year.
And with that, we are out of time for questions. I'd like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Manky for any closing remarks.
Great. Thank you very much, Melanie. And I'd like to thank everybody once again for joining us today on our Q1 earnings call. As you can see, we have a lot of really good momentum taking place right now. And I do go back to the amount of work that the team has done over the last year, a lot of foundation work.
And as you can see, based on where we sit today and what we look into the future, there's a lot of great opportunities that we plan to accelerate into. So we look forward to meeting you at the upcoming weeks. And again, thank you for following Sabre. Have a great day.
And that does conclude today's conference. We thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.