Sabre is answering the wrong question about the GDS

Its CEO says Sabre is an AI-first company, not a legacy GDS. He's probably right — and it doesn't settle the thing suppliers are actually testing: whether they still need the layer at all

by Markus Busch

In a Travel Weekly interview from Sabre's Compass forum, chief executive Kurt Ekert pushed back on the "legacy GDS" label. More than 99% of the company's compute runs in the cloud, he said; the platform is rebuilt and built on Google Gemini; two million hotel properties flow through it. "The sexy way to talk about it is: We are the technical plumbing of the travel industry… All you have to worry about is a great front-end experience, whether you're a TMC, an agency, an airline or a hotel." Take the capability claim at face value. It's plausibly true. It also answers a question no one serious was asking.

The question was never whether the GDS is modern. It's whether it's necessary. Being AI-first describes how well the plumbing works. Disintermediation describes whether a supplier routes through that plumbing at all. Those are different axes. A GDS can run the most sophisticated content-and-caching engine on earth and still be bypassed the week a supplier decides to wire its inventory somewhere directly.

And that week keeps arriving. The same month as this interview, Hilton switched on a direct connection between its reservation system and a corporate booking platform — real-time rates and content over its own APIs, explicitly routing around the GDS. Ekert's own framing is the tell: "all you have to worry about is the front-end." That is the GDS asking to remain the back-end for everyone — TMCs, agencies, airlines, hotels, and, unspoken, the AI agents next in line. It's a bid to stay the indispensable middle in the agent era. The suppliers building their own rails are making the opposite bet.

What "AI-first" is really for. The repositioning is a survival strategy worn as a capability upgrade. The GDS's value was never mainly its technology; it was its position — the neutral place everyone had to pass through. AI-first upgrades the technology. It leaves the position exactly as exposed as it was. If an agent can call a supplier's API directly, the most modern middle is still a middle that can be skipped.

The stake. For a hotel or an airline, the reassurance is worth whatever the front-ends decide. The GDS is proving, convincingly, that it can keep pace with AI. The open question is the older one underneath: whether the businesses that used to pass through it still have to — and a few are already answering by building around it.

One disclosure: I have a commercial interest in hotel distribution connectivity, so I have a stake in how this question resolves. Read the argument with that in mind.

Enjoying this analysis? Hospitality.today delivers daily insights on hotel distribution, AI trends, and travel commerce — straight to your inbox. Subscribe for free at Hospitality.today →