Sabre Corporation: The Thing Behind The Thing For The Travel Industry

Each week, Benzinga examines a stock that might be considered a little under the radar. You may have never heard of the company before, but chances are you're pretty familiar with the line of work it's in. We call these the "things behind the thing."

Travel related stocks saw a move up this week with news that a vaccine from Pfizer Inc PFE and BioNTech SE BNTX showed promising results.

About Sabre Corporation: The thing behind the thing in the travel industry is Sabre Corporation SABR.

Sabre is the largest global distribution systems provider for air bookings and controls a lot of data for the sector.

The company powers industries like airline, airports, car rental companies, cruise lines, hotels, search engines, online travel agencies, railroad and tour companies.

Sabre manages more than $260 billion worth of global travel spend annually. In the last fiscal year, Sabre had a 38.8% market share in airline bookings.

Benzinga Founder and CEO Jason Raznick said he was buying shares of Sabre on Benzinga’s lunchtime YouTube show earlier this week.

“I bought Sabre. They power Orbitz and Booking.com," he said.

Partnership With Google: Sabre expanded on its partnership with Alphabet Inc.'s GOOGGOOGL Google. The companies are launching the industry’s first AI-driven technology platform for the travel industry.

Sabre Travel AI Technology is expected to launch next year and will be the industry’s “first real-time, personalized merchandising engine.”

The new offering could help Sabre on their goal of delivering truly personalized travel by 2025.

Financials: The third quarter saw an improvement over the previous quarter with bookings up. Third-quarter revenue was $278 million.

Sabre signed a number of new commercial deals and renewals in the quarter. The company said over 1,4000 individual airline and agency deals have been signed in 2020.

“In the third quarter, we saw positive signs as GDS and hospitality booking steadily improved, along with passengers boarded,” said the company.

Sabre said they believe there is pent up demand for travel going forward.

In the last fiscal year, Sabre saw revenue of $2.88 billion for its travel segment, $840 million for its airline segment and $293 million for the hospitality segment.

Benzinga's Take: A vaccine could have a major positive impact for the travel company. Pent up demand could boost airline stocks, cruise line stocks and hotels.

Sabre is a company that could benefit from these sectors reopening and seeing strength in 2021. 

Shares of Sabre are up 49% this week on the positive effect a vaccine could have on the travel industry. Shares are still down 56% year-to-date.