Good morning, and welcome to the Sabre First Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. My name is LaShana, and I will be your operator. As a reminder, please note today's call is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to the Vice President of Investor Relations, Kevin Christie. Please go ahead, sir.
Thanks, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our Q1 2021 earnings call. This morning, we issued an earnings press release, which is available on our website at investors. Sabre.com. A slide presentation, which accompanies today's prepared remarks, Also available during this call on the Sabre Investor Relations webpage.
A replay of today's call will be available on our website later this morning. We would like to advise you that our comments contain forward looking statements that represent our beliefs or expectations about future events, including the duration and effects of COVID-nineteen, Industry trends, expected advancements, depreciation and amortization, capital expenditures, cost savings and liquidity among others. All forward looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from the statements made on today's conference call. More information on these risks and uncertainties is contained in our earnings release issued this morning and our SEC filings, including our 2020 Form 10 ks. Throughout today's call, we will also be presenting certain non GAAP financial measures.
All references during today's call to EBITDA, Operating loss and EPS have been adjusted to exclude certain 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. Participating with me are Sean Menke, our Chief Executive Officer and Doug Barnett, our Chief Financial Officer. Dave Schirch, our President of Travel Solutions and Scott Wilson, our President of Hospitality Solutions We'll be available for Q and A after the prepared remarks.
And with that, I'll turn the call over
to Sean. Thanks, Kevin. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Before we get into the details and trends from the Q1, I'd like to take a moment to highlight a few items. First, I'm very pleased to welcome Phyllis Newhouse and Wendy Sturgis as newly elected independent directors to our Board.
Phyllis and Wendy bring significant technology and cybersecurity expertise and we look forward to their perspectives and support over the coming years. On behalf of the Sabre Board and leadership team, I'd also like to thank Joe Osnos, Judy Odom, Renee James and John Siciliano, who retired from our Board last week. Their counsel and guidance over the years has been extremely valuable. 2nd, I'd like to personally congratulate 4 current Sabre team members: Tracy Mercer, Senior Vice President, Product Segment Amy Green, Vice President, Global Business Systems Emma Wilson, Vice President, Marketing and Corey DeCamp, Senior Vice President, Program Management for being named among the top 50 women in travel by the Global Business Travel Association. I'd also like our Sabre teammates in India to know our thoughts and prayers are with them as they navigate through the impact of the COVID-nineteen crisis.
And finally, I'd like to thank all of my Sabre teammates around the world for their service to our customers, shareholders and each other as we all navigate this pandemic. Turning to slide 4. As we have done in prior quarters, on the next slides, I will walk you through specific booking, passengers boarded or PBs and Hospitality CRS transaction trends. But I will start with a bigger picture perspective. Global travel trends Continue to be reflective of COVID-nineteen case counts, cumulative and daily vaccination rates and regional travel restrictions.
In the United States, part of our largest region, we are encouraged by the accelerating pace of daily vaccine doses administered As well as the recent bullish demand comments and capacity plans made by U. S. Airline executives. We have seen this confidence reflected in our North American booking recovery. As expected, international markets vary significantly and collectively have been slower to rebound than U.
S. Domestic travel, including the regions in which vaccine distribution remains slow and daily cases remain high. As Doug will discuss in more detail shortly, this has resulted in a more pronounced rotation in our booking mix. To give further perspective on our largest region, North America represents 55% of our GDS bookings in 2019. As of April 30, about 29% of the total U.
S. Population has been fully vaccinated and about 45% has received at least One dose of COVID-nineteen vaccine. Since our Q4 earnings call, the daily vaccination rate has increased by 1,000,000 vaccines daily From about $1,700,000 in February to $2,700,000 per day in April. U. S.
Travel trends have picked up on this momentum. Our North American gross air bookings, which reflect new demand, have recovered to nearly 50% of 2019 levels over the last 2 weeks of April. On this chart, you can better see the pronounced rotation in regional booking mix towards North America. In the 1st 2 months of the year, Our North American gross bookings were down 72% versus the same timeframe in 2019, whereas the rest of the world was down about 84%. By April, the gap widened with North American gross bookings recovery accelerating to down 53% and the rest of the world down 77% Looking ahead, we expect U.
S. Domestic travel to continue to lead the recovery As the vaccination rollout progresses and reported COVID-nineteen cases continue to decline. We have already seen an improvement in leisure bookings and have begun seeing green shoots in U. S. Business travel with our large TMC customers.
We expect European and APAC markets to recover more slowly due to greater fragmentation, tighter travel restrictions, slower vaccination rates and new variant strains. However, based on what we have seen in the U. S. And these region gains and as each region gains confidence from increasing vaccination rates, We expect booking activity to follow. We remain confident there is pent up demand for global travel and that global travel will recover.
Turning to Slide 5. Industry Air net bookings showed sequential improvement over the 1st part of this year With strong sequential improvements in March April. As compared to 2019 in January, GDS Industry net air bookings were down 82% February March were down 77% and 71%, respectively. April was down 70%, slightly ahead of March. Our largest region, North America, improved the most with a 7 percentage point quarter over quarter recovery And the positive trend continued into April.
Other regions were largely flat quarter over quarter and into April. On slide 6, you can see this effect more clearly using weekly data by region. Positive trends continue to accelerate in North America. EMEA and APAC continue to lag behind the global average. Latin America, which had been showing a strong recovery over the winter, Showed signs of improvement again in late April after a dip in the early spring.
Slide 7 shows Sabre's volume metrics for air gross bookings, Passengers boarded and hotel gross CRS transactions. After a slowdown in January, all metrics have trended in a positive direction with U. S. Domestic, Leisure travel driving much of the improvement. Hotel CRS transactions continue to lead the recovery and reached over 70% of 2019 levels in April.
Turning to slide 8, we continue to be very active commercially in all lines of business. In distribution, we've added several airlines to our GDS, including SkyUp in the Ukraine and Eigo Airways in Italy. We also renewed agreements with carriers including WestJet and Frontier. On the agency side, we added several new agencies including ClearTrip, The largest OTA in the Middle East Kiwi dotcom, Europe's fastest growing OTA and Omega, one of the largest business management companies in the U. S.
We also renewed agencies including Canoo Travel, the largest travel company in the Middle East and Travel Hanyo, one of the Europe's largest OTAs. Treblehanyu is also implementing Sabre Virtual Payments. On the IT solutions side, we've completed implementations of SabreSonic with Asky in Zambia. We also added a couple of new Radix customers including U. S.
Startup Avelo Airlines. Air India Express and Avelo Airlines each renewed their Radix agreements. Avelap also added market intelligence and other operations related products. We also had some key renewals in our operations portfolio, including Flight Plan Manager with Spirit Airlines, Crew Control with jet2.com And crew manager went live with a jowl. In hospitality, in addition to the traction with Enterprise Hoteliers announced last quarter, We continue to be very active in the Community segment with many new deals and renewals signed.
Despite the effects of COVID-nineteen, we have a healthy sales pipeline and are well positioned to capture new opportunities. Turning to slide 9, we have talked about the importance Strategic initiatives to enable Sabre to capture opportunities created by evolving travel trends and to increase shareholder value. Let me now update you on the commercial activity that demonstrates our progress against these initiatives this quarter. First, personalized offers. We are moving aggressively to create new IT capabilities, methods and intelligence to allow suppliers such as airlines to deliver more customer centric personalized offers.
Examples of momentum in this area in Q1 include LATAM Airlines going live with dynamic pricing in key markets. We successfully migrated JetBlue, Fintur and OSCAI to Revenue Optimizer, our revenue management tool that enables airlines to set optimal price points, Availability and provides real time data to better support decision making and performance analysis. Additionally, Phase 1 of our Sabre Smart Retail Engine remains on track for rollout this spring. As a reminder, we expect Sabre Smart retail engine to enable airlines to deliver personalized offers to their customers and better serve the needs of today's travelers, while unlocking more value per passenger boarded. The second, the future of distribution in NDC.
Airlines have been investing to differentiate their brands in a number of ways, including notably with ancillary products. Although this practice has created more choices for travelers, it has also created a challenge. While it is easy for consumers to determine the cost of travel, it has become more difficult to understand what the related travel experience will be. This quarter, we announced a new industry first airline storefront to help solve this problem. The new storefront provides digital shelves That organize airlines offerings to support product differentiation and provide more merchandising opportunities for airlines, while allowing efficient comparison shopping for travel buyers based on the total value of the offer.
Delta Airlines One of the carriers who helped collaborate on the development of our new airline storefront. Yesterday, we announced a new value based multiyear distribution agreement with Delta. This represents an industry first model that we believe will create value for the travel ecosystem. In terms of NDC progress, This quarter, we achieved IATA Level 4 Certification as an IT provider after previously reaching that certification milestone as an NDC aggregator. This certification confirms our technical ability to support a set of criteria related to full offer and order management capabilities.
We also expanded access to NDC offers from Singapore Airlines to more than 25 agency locations. Eligible agencies can now not only shop Quarter, we announced the launch of NDC offers from Qantas to travel agencies in Australia and New Zealand, with plans to expand to agencies and other regions over time. Finally, NDC content can now be booked through our corporate online booking tool Get There. Low cost carrier growth. We talked on previous earnings call about the investment we are making in the low cost carrier segment and how we are expanding the capabilities of Radix to increase sales opportunities in this fast growing leisure segment of travel.
This quarter, we made important progress in this pursuit, including the integration of SabreSonic inventory for availability into Radix. This improves Radix's ability to scale to larger airlines. We continue to view the LCC segment as an important growth avenue for Sabre. Hospitality Solutions Growth. We continue to grow our Central Reservation Systems business.
As a reminder, our CRS Industry leading and serves more than 42,000 hotels, resorts and chains across nearly 200 countries and territories. SynXis Central Reservations allows hoteliers to distribute rates and inventory to more than 400 online channels across the world, including all major GDF systems as well as hundreds of online travel agencies. Last quarter, we signed 2 new enterprise wins representing over 100 hotel properties across 54 countries with the majority coming from Louvre. This quarter, we made progress in support of these new enterprise CRS deployments And our Hospitality Solutions business generally, including setting up Google Cloud Environments in 2 of our 4 global regions. We are optimistic about the growth outlook for our Hospitality Solutions business as hoteliers are increasingly turning to Sabre to broaden their distribution and reach to drive incremental revenue opportunities.
And finally, our technology transformation. I'm excited about the progress we are making in our tech transformation. This quarter, we moved Travel Solutions Agency Air Shopping to Google Cloud. We believe running our future air shopping growth on GCP is important in a post COVID-nineteen recovery because of its scalability and lower cost. This is one of our 3 major technology milestones for 2021, with the other 2 being moving at least 15% of our mid range workload Transitioning Hospitality Solutions CRS to the Google Cloud Platform.
These milestones are on track. Additionally, in Q1, we created a GCP region only about 30 miles from our existing data center in Tulsa operated by DXC. This close proximity combined with high bandwidth linkage is expected to create an extremely low latency connection to simplify migrations of capacity from DXC to the Google Cloud. Finally, we successfully offloaded some compute heavy mainframe capabilities, Including display inventory for most airlines and schedule changes for the majority of non hosted airlines. As we continue to migrate compute from the mainframe, We expect to realize further savings.
In conclusion, despite the challenges presented by the pandemic, we are making essential technology investments, Developing innovative new products and advancing strategic initiatives and seeing commercial success. We believe Sabre is well positioned competitively as the travel environment rebounds. And with that, I'd like to turn the call over to Doug.
Thanks, Sean, and good morning, everyone. As expected, the COVID-nineteen pandemic continued to weigh heavily on our results in Q1. Revenue was down 50% in the quarter, totaling $327,000,000 versus $659,000,000 in Q1 of last year. Versus last year, Distribution revenue in the quarter was down 62% to $152,000,000 Our distribution bookings were down 55% year over year in the quarter With air bookings down 52% and lodging ground and sea bookings down 72%. Gross air bookings were down 80% And 73% year over year in January February respectively and up 4% year over year in March.
We report bookings on a net basis, meaning net of cancellations. Net air bookings were down 79% 69% year over year in January February and up 409% year over year in March as cancellations were exceptionally high in March last year. We believe comparisons to 2019 may provide more useful information. Compared to 2019, gross air bookings were down 82%, 77% 69% in January, February March, And net air bookings were down 81%, 76% and 66% in those same months. As expected, domestic leisure bookings have recovered faster than both international leisure and corporate bookings and represented 50% of our total bookings this quarter.
Domestic Leisure bookings are our lowest booking fee segment. Now that cancellation activity is normalized, the impact of this mix shift on our average booking fee can be more easily seen. We expect a negative mix impact on our average booking fee to persist until international and corporate bookings make a more meaningful recovery. Our IT Solutions revenue was down 36% year over year with passengers boarded down 55% in the quarter. As a reminder, IT Solutions has a higher percentage of revenue not tied to travel volumes than Distribution and Hospitality Solutions.
Hospitality Solutions revenue was down 29% with a 16% decline in CRS transactions. Because our property mix, Particularly in the Enterprise segment, as less dependent on city centers and conference venues, we continue to see relative outperformance and our central reservation system transactions versus distribution bookings and passengers boarded. EBITDA and operating income were negative in Q1, reflecting the impact of the COVID-nineteen pandemic. The year over year decline in revenue Partially offset by declines in Travel Solutions incentive expense and Hospitality Solutions transaction fees due to lower volumes. Headcount expense due to the ongoing benefit from cost savings initiatives we previously implemented and technology expenses due to the lower transaction volume environment.
Additionally, our provision for expected credit losses, which impacts SG and A, decreased by $39,000,000 versus the prior year quarter. Net income and EPS were also negative in the quarter. Year over year, the declines were driven by the factors impacting operating results as well as increased interest and lower tax benefit. In addition, free cash flow was a negative $204,000,000 in Q1. As we mentioned on our last quarterly call, We expect Q1 free cash flow to be the lowest of any quarter in 2021.
This is primarily due to the timing of large working capital items That will have offsetting benefits over the rest of the year as well as $8,000,000 in severance. We ended the quarter with a cash balance of $1,300,000,000 And have no significant near term uses of cash. Turning to Slide 11. In response to a retuned comment letter from the SEC Regarding our calculation of adjusted EBITDA, we are no longer excluding amortization of upfront incentive consideration for our adjusted EBITDA calculation. We believe this change will provide enhanced transparency and facilitate analysis of our company.
This change has no impact on revenue, adjusted operating income, adjusted EPS or free cash flow. We will continue to break out amortization of upfront incentives in the operating section of our cash flow statement. As a reminder, in the GDS industry, travel agency incentives are typically paid over time with bookings as well as upfront at contracted exception or renewal. In the latter case, typically there is a related customer volume commitment. From an accounting perspective, these upfront cash incentive payments are amortized over the life of the contract.
Amortization of upfront incentive Consideration was $78,000,000 in 20.18, dollars 83,000,000 in 20.19 $75,000,000 in 20.20. Over the medium term, we expect annual amortization of upfront incentive consideration to be between $50,000,000 $70,000,000 Turning to Slide 12. As we have previously discussed, we began migrating our systems to the cloud And transition to full adoption and maturity of agile development methods resulted in a decrease in the percentage of our technology spend eligible for capitalization under U. S. GAAP.
In 2018, we capitalized 24% of our total technology spend. In 2019, we capitalized 9% and in 2020, just 5%. This shift in capitalization mix Temporarily burdened our P and L with both the increased portion of technology spend that is expensed in current periods plus The depreciation and amortization from previous capitalization. Going forward, we expect our capitalization rate to remain at 5% or below. Therefore, we expect our CapEx to remain low or to range between $50,000,000 $90,000,000 annually over the next 5 years.
Because of this, we are seeing our depreciation and amortization expense fall. We expect annual D and A to fall from about $200,000,000 in 2021 to $110,000,000 by 2025, which would provide earnings leverage over the medium term. With that, I'll turn it back to Sean.
Thanks, Doug. Despite the pandemic, we have continued to make critical investments, including in our products and our technology migration. With the $200,000,000 annual cost reductions We've already made, if revenue returns to 2019 levels, we'd expect to have a 5 percentage point higher EBITDA margin all else equal. We continue to expect our annual cost savings to increase to $275,000,000 by 2024, which would further increase our margins, again, assuming all else equal. As travel demand returns, we expect to be positioned with larger addressable opportunities, More advanced innovative products and faster sales cycle and product deployments.
I'll end by once again Thank you, my Sabre teammates around the world for their dedication and hard work. And with that, operator, I'd like to open up the call for questions.
We'll pause for just a moment. You have a question from the line of Jed Kelly with Oppenheimer.
Hey, great. Thanks for taking my questions and appreciate all prepared remarks in the slides. I guess a couple of ones, but I guess the first one for you Sean. Saw the Delta announcement yesterday.
So can you
just help us understand like how it's announced at like Delta? How we'll actually see that translate into the financials sort of like on the Revenue line?
Yes. It's a very good question Jed. And it goes back to some of the things that we have been trying to do in the And that is with the technology enhancements and what we're doing in products is how do we help Airlines sell the products and services the way that they want. Meaning if it's the branded fares or selling ancillaries, it's the capability of doing that. And that's what the storefront allows us to do that be it Delta Airlines, American Airlines, whoever is there.
It's very similar to if you go to an airline.com and you see how the branded fares are laid out, it's that. Now from an economic perspective, the thing that we have talked about is how do we align the interest specifically airlines and what we're doing with technology that as we advance our tech As we advance technology capabilities that if we're helping them sell higher yield tickets, we will actually get more revenue for that. So it really is driving in that vein, Jed, of How do we make sure that technology is being looked at as valuable and in doing so we can drive more revenue into the future.
And we're seeing Expedia make a big push here with the marketing and the advertising. I mean, Does that benefit the OTAs, which I think are going to drive a lot of volume over the next 18 months? I mean, how is that going to be integrated?
Hey, Jed. This is Dave Jirk. The answer would be it can. The technology itself is based 1st and foremost on The new airline storefront capability that we talked about, which essentially is a digital shelf technology that has a set of APIs and all of our Customers in all of our agencies will have access to that as part of the process. So if they choose to use the technology and Continue on the journey of some of these retailing pieces that Sean was referring to absolutely could take advantage of the situation.
All right. And then just one more for me. Can you talk about the pipeline for solution contracts over the next 18 months and how your Google Cloud contract is going to help you Vincent wins.
Yes. Jed, again, it's Dave. So, on the pipeline part of your Question, we continue to be invited into conversations. We continue to have activity that is occurring. Our LCC efforts I would say are probably the strongest you might have seen a Wall Street Journal article the other day that 90 plus LCCs are being launched globally.
We hope to take advantage of that situation. Secondly, on the full service side and just globally in general, These things tend to stop, start, stop, start because of the pandemic situation in various resources. But we are actively engaged and as Saw in the transaction activity, a couple of quarters ago with our ACI win and our Pacific Airlines Those were examples of that activity in that pipeline structure moving forward.
And Jed, this is Sean. I'll take the question on Google. And Let me put it in this perspective because we talk about when we did the deal, do you have the cloud economics, you have the technology transformation, You have the integration of the data analytics, AI, ML capabilities and then the innovation framework. But if you take it into your question on The financial impact, think of it this way is when we look at expanding margins that's really through a lower cost So the infrastructure and what we're doing, so it's lower unit cost of compute and that's why we keep talking about this because that does drive the cost savings that we're wanting to do. The other things that it's doing is just lower infrastructure requirements that allows us to again save money.
The other piece of it That I that we talk to talk about internally is just really driving efficiency on the tech transformation and product development on the labor cost side of the equation because It allows us just to become more efficient. So again, you're funding the cost savings. Flipping into the revenue side, I sort of look at it a couple of different ways. Think about us integrating Google technology with existing revenue streams that we have out there today. So when we talk about smart retailing engine That allows us to combine that with what we have right now and allows us from our perspective to be a lot more competitive For new business going forward both in the full service carrier side of the equation, but also on the low cost carrier side of the equation.
Again, you can think about Travel AI the same way as we can Those data analytics capabilities and begin to put it into things that we're doing on the operating side or the commercial side. The other thing that we're doing is when we're focused in partnership with Google is how do we combine Sabre plus Google Tech to open up new revenue streams. And right now, I think we have probably 5, 6, 7 different things that are going on as it relates to those opportunities that We'll want to talk about into the future. And then the other piece of it is really just a partnering and co development of new products that we think can be transformational in the marketplace. So It's not like there's just going to be this big bang.
If you create a new product, it goes out and there's a revenue stream, a lot of what's happening right now are enhancement of our capabilities that are going to allow us to be More competitive in the marketplace and we actually believe position us ahead of our competition.
Thank you.
You have a question from the line of Matthew Broom with Mizuho.
Thanks very much. Hi, Sean and Doug. Does the relative Geographic strength in the U. S, does that affect your sort of tactical investment allocation decisions, particularly In terms of your go to market assets?
It hasn't really changed a lot. Again, I think we're looking at this sort of in 2 phases, That's right. We're in the recovery phase right now and this is sort of the lumpiness that we're seeing and what's taking place. As we think long term, it really does go back
to the initiatives that I was talking about because that is global in
nature and be it in the This is what I was talking about because that is global in nature and be it in the United States similar to what we just talked about with Delta Airlines. There's airlines around the world that are trying to do that. Delta is really doing that really through ATP Co. Others are doing it through NDC. But it really hasn't changed the way that we think about it.
It's very focused on where we think things are going to be long term As we get to the backside of COVID-nineteen, a recovery is really taking place.
Got it. And Hospitality Solutions Continues to lead the recovery. Do you have any update on your plans to implement a full service PMS system?
Yes. I'll let Scott answer that question for you.
Hey, good morning. Yes, this is Scott. One of the things that we continue to believe is that a Fully integrated hospitality solution set built on a public cloud is going to be winning proposition. Hoteliers are looking for a seamless and Way to drive more business in the market that has to include a full service PMS and we're very much committed to doing that. Keep in mind, we do have a very robust Property Management System in place today.
We continue to invest in that and we continue to drive that product further into the market and up market. Very much. That continues to be a strategic focus for us. We think that's going to be a key part of our strategy.
Perfect. And maybe if I could just squeeze one last one in. And just curious if you have any updates in terms of Your internal realignment and how that's progressing?
Yes. I mean, The team has done a really good job. If you go back to the actions that we took in 2020, the vast majority of that was done under Dave Shirk in the Travel Solutions Organization. We're fully integrated into that new structure. Part of it probably really more on the back half of the year was getting people in new seats and getting alignment.
But what I would tell you right now is I think the teams are doing well. We got the savings that we were looking for. So Job well done by the team.
Good to hear.
Thanks very much.
Thank you.
We have a question from the line of Josh Beyer with Vince Stanley.
Thanks for the question. I might ask 2. 1 on the hospitality side. Just wondering with Thinking back to all the enterprise wins and announcements over the last year, just wondering like where we are on implementations and timing of When we see some of that momentum impact revenue?
Josh, Let me start by just mentioning the Louvre deal that we announced last quarter. We actually worked with them for a few months before we announced the deal to talk about how quickly we wanted to get that In fact, we don't talk as much about tech transformation on the hospitality side, but do keep in mind, we're going through the same transformation. Our first version or instance of our CRS platform on the Google Cloud will be a Europe instance and it goes live this quarter. We're doing that so we actually can start to migrate their properties onto our Google instance of CRS this summer and into the fall to be complete next year. So you take that and a number of the other things that we have in the pipeline, we think we're going to start having a pretty steady stream of growth in the enterprise space over the next 6 to 24 months.
And I would add one I had one comment just on that. It does go back to the partnership with Google specifically on the cloud is Our ability to essentially have landing zones in regions around the world and the reduction in latency as well as redundancy is so important
to these customers. And again, Louvre is an
example of that partnership being And again, Louvre is an example of that partnership being important and for us to be able to think about things a little bit differently.
Great. And I did have a few on free cash flow and breakeven. Wondering if Do you have an update to the demand threshold to breakeven versus 2019 travel demand that we've got in the last couple of quarters?
Yes. Nothing's changed visavis those thresholds. Still, it's 50% it's going to range between 56% 67% of 2019 levels. And I'll ask you, well, those goalposts all depend on mix.
Right. And this quarter, Are you able to provide any additional context on the large working capital items that you've called out that are weighing on free cash flow? Just wondering Like how big of an impact those were and as we go through the year, if there's any insight into the seasonality of that and the impact on free cash flow?
We haven't given any value of it, but I can tell
you that there'll be a meaningful reduction in the use of free cash flow as
we move through the balance of the year.
Great. Thanks.
You have a question from the line of Neil Steer with Redburn.
Hi, thanks very much and thanks for taking the question. It seems from the data that you've given us that the sort of the blended reservation fee was probably down around about 25 Can you firstly comment on that? And is that totally a mix effect? Or has there been any underlying sort of Price pressure that crept through as deals have been renegotiated. Thanks.
No, all a mix effect. That's what it is.
Okay. And then, in response to, one of the earlier questions, you mentioned that, obviously, with the Delta contract that you announced the other day, The reservation fee you get is actually tied in some way to the upsell of the ancillaries, which is clearly moving towards, obviously, Aligning the reservation fees to, I suppose, the value of the ticket. Is this a meaningful change in the Strategy and how do you underpin and make sure that we don't move sort of more significantly to a pricing structure That's related to the value of the tickets that's being sold or indeed is that how you want to take the pricing structure?
Yes. I mean, If you go back, Neil, this is one thing that we have talked about for a long period of time is you have to look at it from a value based perspective. And this is a clear step in the direction where we wanted to go because when you're investing in technology, you're trying to differentiate your Capabilities versus your competition and we do believe this is what's taking place and drives to the agreement that we have With Delta Airlines, I would also say the same thing as it relates to the Lufthansa agreement that there are incentives associated with technology advancement that allow them to The higher yield traffic. So again, this is very much in line with what we want to do because we do believe that aligns the parties across the ecosystem.
Okay, thanks. And just one final one on Radix, obviously, the compromise that you announced to the system last week, can you give us an update on that,
Sure, Neil. This is Dave. So we had the incident that we talked about. This is our Radix That particular piece was, as we noted in our public statement, was a malware incident, and it affected roughly 20 airlines. Everyone is back And that was a progression through that particular process and we are in active contact with them working through Continued movement forward in the environment that we've now reestablished around that piece of it and some of the changes that we've made to that environment.
Yes. And as you'd imagine, Neil, we were very apologetic for what took place. An important thing to note is they operated throughout the impacted timeframe. What really was Happening was the ability to sell tickets into the future. So again, the team said, work with the customers to work through what we needed to address.
Thanks very much.
We have
a question from the line of Victor Chang with Bank of America.
Thanks for taking my question. Free from my side. So on the smart retail engine that you mentioned, Do you have any customers lined up already pre launch? And then jumping to NBC, Obviously, noting the continued progress in certifications and number of deals signed, what percentage of bookings are we expecting in the coming year or so? And should we expect similar economics versus traditional GDS distribution channel, particularly as you have alluded to just now the technology and NDC in this case over time Prove its value for higher yield per seat, ends up just being a shift in distribution channel.
And just one last one on recovery. You provided a lot of color on regional mix and noted that stronger domestic Leisure Recovery. So just wondering if you have any color, a bit more color on potential corporate recovery that you're seeing, particularly in April.
Thanks. So let me start the process, Victor, here. On the Smart Retail engine, all of our Focus on this has been to roll out the set of products in the spring timeframe that continues to move along And he is on track. As we noted last quarter, first pieces of some of the alpha and beta pilot work were We're already taken live in testing at Etihad Airlines. And this quarter, we took further capability sets for pilots That are live and being tested at LatAm in several markets.
And so we are optimistic That this particular piece will help in the retailing elements as part of the recovery with airlines. So we are Already engaged in pipeline discussions with folks that are interested in the technology and we'll give you guys more updates on that So that I think addresses your first question. On your NDC question, you had a lot of parts there. So Let me see if I can maybe take a stab at some of those, as we kind of work through that. And then I'll ask for Sean or Doug to maybe comment on the regional and domestic piece, in this.
So on the NDC piece as part of the your question around percent of bookings in the shift and how we'll see that and what will be the change etcetera. Again, first off, NDC transactions are very, very small at this point. As you can imagine, it's a volume situation that certainly is Hi, to the pandemic. It's also the case, we've gone live with Qantas in Singapore and you can see the outlets and the things that we've done there, But it's still the case that transaction volume is extremely minimal at this particular point in time. I think the other thing that you'll see as part of that and time will Tell as part of the recovery, the majority of airlines that are doing NDC are ones that were very far along before COVID.
The vast majority of airlines have paused or completely stopped their NDC activity at this particular point in time because of the pandemic and the resource Kit to their organizations and cost containment, etcetera. We continue to move the roadmap along, but As I said, I think it will take some time before we really truly be able to understand and answer the question. But I think this is part of why the Andy sorry, the announcement of Delta is so significant because that is also a very advanced retailing effort that's a first of kind To move that piece out, which I think the number of airlines and agencies will find much easier to begin that journey and find Alternatives to how they might think about retailing, in the environment that's out there as well. So we're providing a number of avenues for them to kind of head down that particular path. And then as far as the regional domestic
Yes. This is Sean. I'll go ahead and take that. And I think part of the way and I'll come back to your Business specifically, but what we truly have seen and we're trying to get this in the commentary is everything is based on confidence right now. There's no doubt that as we're seeing In the U.
S. Domestic marketplace, when confidence has improved, we're seeing because of vaccine rates Our continuing to improve testing is good. Things are beginning to reopen that demand is improving and we've seen it more from the leisure side. As I mentioned in my prepared comments, we are seeing green shoots as it relates to corporate travel. At the beginning of the year, It was down call it 90% or so.
It's been sort of that way for a period of time. We've probably seen in the domestic U. S. 15 to 20 point improvement from where we were. So again, that's just part of the confidence and things starting to happen.
We do drill it down into specific sectors and understand certain sectors are moving more than other sectors. But really from From the beginning of the year, we're beginning to see some really good movement there. What then happens is you have airlines that add more seats And that's really what we're seeing in the U. S. Marketplace is more seats are being added.
So I expand it because this is how we try to think about balance Recovery is when we think about international flying and as Doug talks about that's where we Make more of our money, the margins are higher there. International standards are important as it relates to bilateral discussions between countries and We at Sabre as well as other travel CEOs have been engaged with the Biden administration on trying to get standards in place, opening up travel corridors or bubbles as We have seen Hong Kong, Singapore. We've seen the Trans Tasmanian flight corridor as well as Recent announcements in Greece and even going back to the U. K. When they began to outline what they were going to do from opening travel, we see shopping pop and then we The bookings begin to happen.
So we believe the demand is there. And with that, sort of that cycle continues. That capacity will be added back. Again, sort of step by step, day by day, but that gives you some insight on just how we're seeing recovery, but also what we're seeing on the business side because it is important.
Got you. Thank you. That's very clear.
And there are no additional questions at this time. I will turn the call back to Mr. Minkie for closing remarks.
Great. Thank you very much. Once again, I would like to thank my Sabre employees for everything that they continue day in and day out and for the people on the call investors that are focused on Sabre. Thank you for your focus on the company and look forward to talking to you again.
Thank you again for joining us this morning. We appreciate your interest in Sabre and look forward to speaking with you again soon.