Travel Tech CEO Series: Sabre Bets on an Ex-Airline Boss to Reboot Its Industry Relationships
Skift Take
In his first Q&A with Skift, Sean Menke, the new CEO of Sabre, says that his past stints as CEO of Frontier Airlines and as a top executive at Hawaiian Airlines and Air Canada give him vital insight into how to steer the technology giant through tougher-than-usual negotiations with airlines.
Editor's Note: This year we expanded our coverage of the technology companies that do the behind-the-scenes work of powering the technology systems of the world's major travel companies.
We’re sitting down with a handful of industry leaders for our new Travel Tech CEO Listening Series to discover where they think the industry is heading.
It was only in January that Sean Menke became the chief executive of Sabre, a travel technology company based in Southlake, Texas, with 10,000 employees worldwide.
Yet Menke has already come out fighting.
He says his company is well aware of the recent spate of glitches that have downed airline reservation systems. While Sabre wasn't responsible for all of the affected systems, Menke says he has "pulled forward some additional spend and re-prioritized projects to get at some of the key issues that need addressing."
Menke faces industry critics who imply that Sabre hasn't invested adequately in its various systems.
On its April 2017 quarterly earnings call, the chief operating officer of American Airlines, Robert Isom, said that the airline's rollout of a premium economy product has been slow because it has to work with its third-party distributors "to make sure that the product is being appropriately displayed in all the systems."
This echoed comments earlier this year by United's president Scott Kirby, who fretted about the technical abilities of the middlemen and by top executives at International Airlines Group, the parent company of British Airways, who said that they are frustrated.
Menke says claims of a "technical debt" are full of nonsense. He says his company has been aggressively ramping up its capital expenditure.
Those were among the newsier highlights of Skift's first one-on-one interview (in full, below) with Menke in late April.
First, the backstory: A majority of Sabre's revenue still comes from being one of the world's four major middlemen of airplane tickets, along with Amadeus, Travelport, and Travelsky.
Airlines distribute their fares via these so-called global distribution systems, or GDSs. Sabre, for one, provides booking platforms to more than 400,000 travel agents worldwide plus connections to online travel agencies like Expedia.
These airline middlemen were supposed to be old news, overtaken by newer technologies and nimbler startups. On the contrary, today, after a couple of years of revenue growth, Sabre's market capitalization has risen to about $6.4 bil
