Sabre Corporation (SABR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
March 3, 2026
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Josh Baer
AnalystsAll right. Before we begin, for important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley research disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. And if you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representatives. My name is Josh Baer, software analyst at Morgan Stanley. Thrilled to have the Sabre leadership team here with us today, Kurt Ekert, CEO; and Mike Randolfi, CFO. Thank you so much for joining us.
Kurt Ekert
ExecutivesThanks, Josh. Our pleasure.
Josh Baer
AnalystsGreat to see you. Maybe let's kick it off with the exciting news around shareholder rights before we get into AI in the business. Can you give some background on the recent shareholder rights plan with regard to Constellation? What does it entail? What is it in response to?
Kurt Ekert
ExecutivesYes. So you saw the press release we issued on Sunday evening, and there were other disclosures we issued as well. That was in response to a significant accumulation of shares by Constellation, a Sabre shareholder. And we took this action to protect the company as well as the shareholders. So beyond that, we're not going to comment publicly today. But we believe this -- we have spoken to a number of investors and analysts and generally, we received a favorable response and folks understand why we've done this.
Josh Baer
AnalystsOkay. We saw the market response as well. So Kurt, from your perspective, to kick it off, what were some of the most important Sabre accomplishments over the last year? And what are your priorities as we head into 2026?
Kurt Ekert
ExecutivesYes. We articulate our strategy with 2 key elements. One is delevering. Last year, we paid down $1 billion of debt, dramatically improved our leverage ratio. And so we're dramatically improving the balance sheet quality of the business. And then two is its growth through innovation. So last year, some of the key accomplishments were the introduction of MCP server and agentic AI. As you saw earlier this year, we've announced a number of key partnerships with agentic, great innovation with respect to the SabreMosaic Airline IT platform, and we're seeing great traction, especially on the offer side of the portfolio there. And then within distribution, significant conversion of one new business, the expansion of our air distribution marketplace and then very strong growth with both with hotel distribution as well as our payments portfolio. So a really good year, both from a balance sheet and an innovation perspective.
Josh Baer
AnalystsExcellent. And you've put out 2026 and 2027 kind of growth commentary, looking for mid-single-digit volume and revenue growth in each of those years. So I'm wondering with the transactional business model, some volatility that we have seen historically in this end market, what gives you the line of sight to put out that growth target for '27?
Michael Randolfi
ExecutivesSure. So a few things. First, as we looked at 2026, let me just start by saying our underlying baseline assumption, which we think is hopefully conservative is a flat industry. It's not our assessment of the industry, that's a planning assumption. So when we talk mid-single digits, that's based on our internal growth strategies. And it's comprised of a few things. One is we've talked about our push into the LCC part of our multisource platform and really extending the tail of those carriers. We see that we launched a lot of our new tools that we expected to launch in the summer of last year that was launched this year. That's going to be very additive to our growth. As we've articulated, we expect to continue to take share as we've done in the last year, we continue to expect to take that this year. And we expect to continue to grow NDC. Now with that, what I would say is leading into this year, up to our call, if I look at the 10, 12 weeks leading up to our call, what I would say is we saw consistent with our guide for the quarter and the year, what I would describe as the most consistent bookings, both geographically and across customer mix leading up to the call. So when we look at it, we think the guidance of mid-single digits for this year we feel really good about that. And as we look at 2027 and we see the continued growth in our growth strategies, we feel really good about that as well.
Kurt Ekert
ExecutivesAnd then the second piece is, obviously, with the inflation offset program, our gross profit improvement should fall to the bottom line and accrete both at the EBITDA and the free cash flow level. So we feel like we're doing the right thing from a growth and a balance sheet standpoint. But as Mike said, the market backdrop that we're experiencing, Middle East war notwithstanding, is frankly the best that we've seen in a number of years.
Josh Baer
AnalystsExcellent. And we'll dig into a lot of those growth areas. But first, I want to start with what's maybe most topical front of mind, key debate, agentic AI. Is it an opportunity or a threat? I mean, you've positioned it as a huge opportunity. So I want to unpack that. And directly, does agentic travel shopping increase or decrease Sabre's relevance? And how does your data and your content breadth? Does it help support and enhance the moat?
Kurt Ekert
ExecutivesSo let me just speak about it from an ecosystem standpoint. If you think about -- it's all about where the funnel of eyeballs and traffic will derive. And so if you think about our business today with managed corporate travel, where procurement or HR are directing employees where to go to shop for and book their travel, I don't see that changing with AI. You saw the safety and security of the traveler, corporate negotiated rates, company policy. There is going to be an inherent mandate for the TMC or the booking layer to have a consumer-grade conversational commerce capability. And that may drive a technology arms race or consolidation there, but we think we're very well positioned in that part of the market. That's about 45% of our air distribution portfolio. On the leisure side, very different story. Obviously, where you have the Airline or Hotel.coms and you have the loyal traveler or the credit card customer of those platforms, they're going to continue to be very sticky. Likewise, I think you're going to see online travel agents or build very good conversational commerce layers. And you're going to see traditional travel agents, let's say, brick-and-mortar who have niche offerings like cruise or tour, they're going to continue to do what they do. I think there's 3 areas where you're going to see behavior change. One is for the nonloyal customer of the supplier.com, the customer that goes there once a year, if they're offered a better user experience by some other intermediary or a player, it's likely that, that transaction is going to happen not in the airline or hotel.coms, but let's say, in this new agentic commerce intermediary place. Number two is metasearch. Metasearch basically has had such success because they price arbitrage on behalf of the consumer. But the user experience is not good post decision because you get launched into a different ecosystem for the fulfillment and the servicing of your travel. And so a good end-to-end agentic experience may supersede that. And then the third is for the OTAs who derive significant traffic from metasearch, they may see that traffic at risk. And so the key is think about for all the existing players is how do you build a consumer-grade conversational commerce layer because customers will go where there's a better UX or they have better confidence. And so I think some of the new platforms, the new emerging platforms are going to succeed there, and they're going to take share away from the other channels. If you're one of these new players, for example, we just announced a partnership with PayPal and Mindtrip, Mindtrip being the LLM, PayPal bringing its payment network or its consumer base to the flow, we're the back end. We're the search, booking, servicing, fulfillment layer behind there. Why didn't Mindtrip just say we're going to go direct connect with everybody? Because there's -- doing a direct connect is fairly simplistic technology. All you're doing is you're writing to a supplier's API. But now the -- all the data that sits there and all the complexity of handling that traffic and doing that at scale, it scales exponentially or logarithmically from a complexity standpoint. And so unless you want to build a GDS or you want to build like the next version of the OTA, it doesn't make sense when you can plug into us -- and you can -- on day 1, for example, Mindtrip will go live in Q2 with a full end-to-end offering with servicing, et cetera. And that's going to be pretty compelling. What we hear from the large agentic players is they want to do likewise. They don't want a metasearch model. They want to own the customer from front to back, and we can provide that to all of them. Now what's the -- is there -- will they try to disintermediate us because of margin? Well, we charge airlines and hoteliers on average about 1.5% of the value of what's booked with them, that's not a large profit pool opportunity for them. And we provide a lot of infrastructure and capability, and it's quite capital intensive to do that. Now on the other hand, if you're looking at the hotel world, where you might be paying a 15% cost of sale to an intermediary, that might be something that's attractive for an LLM to try to disintermediate because that's a significant profit pool. So we think, one, the economic opportunity for somebody to disintermediate us is not that attractive. Number two is what we do is very complex, and we have massive data. And that data is very important because in a world where you're searching and you have to provide millisecond response time to provide a good user experience, you want to avoid all those hits to the supplier because otherwise, it's very difficult from a physics and a cost standpoint. We can do intelligent caching in front of that search for speed and for efficiency and the relevance of search is very important. You're not going to -- as a consumer and an LLM, you're not going to scroll through pages of response times. You're going to look, you're going to say, okay, there's 3 choices, what do I want to book, and it's going to be a very rapid, easy experience. The relevance of that response has to be right the first time. So we think we're actually really well positioned. And again, we think that much of what we do, there's a pretty strong defensive moat. There's a little bit of risk, but the offensive opportunity here for us to become the rails for the agentic AI industry. We think we are in the leading position, and it's going to be a huge accelerant to Sabre.
Josh Baer
AnalystsI think that's really clear. What are you seeing then from the incumbents from a competitive perspective just around what they're doing around also trying to position as the back end or the rail.
Kurt Ekert
ExecutivesDo you mean our competitors when you say that?
Josh Baer
AnalystsYes.
Kurt Ekert
ExecutivesI think that we and Amadeus have a distinct advantage over the other super aggregators in this marketplace in terms of the quality of our content, our data and our technology solutions. With what we've done with our agentic API specifically, the reason you've seen large announcements from us and not Amadeus, we believe, is that we have a distinct advantage, and we're told by large technology platforms that, that is the case. So no question, they'll lean into this space very aggressively, but we believe we have the lead position right now. We're going to try to lean into that very hard.
Josh Baer
AnalystsGreat. And what's the update on the Google partnership? Are you still co-developing solutions? Is it...
Kurt Ekert
ExecutivesSo Google has been terrific. We are now -- 99-plus percent of our compute is in the Google Cloud environment. So from a resiliency, a scale, a security standpoint and an efficiency standpoint, it's the best place in the world to be, and they've been a fabulous partner there for Sabre. Separately, there's a development partnership, and so we do co-develop. And in fact, if you look at the SabreMosaic Airline Solutions, for example, that's all built on Google's Vertex and Gemini AI capabilities. So that remains very strong. One of the key questions is when you look at Google Flight Search, which is a metasearch offering versus Gemini, if they want to replicate and do what other agentic players are saying they want to do, which is they want to host an end-to-end experience, what Google does not do is fulfillment and servicing. And so there's a key question about what that model will be going forward. But I would just say that we've got a great strategic partnership with Google. They've been a fabulous partner, and we would love to grow that partnership over time, and we'll see what happens.
Josh Baer
AnalystsExcellent. Let's shift gears and talk about air bookings and market share. Your air bookings has accelerated going from negative 3% growth, I believe, in Q1 to positive 4% by the end of the year. December was even higher at positive 7%. So can you unpack some of the drivers of that improvement throughout the year and also touch on what prevented you from reaching the original double-digit growth?
Kurt Ekert
ExecutivesYes. So last year was very turbulent and challenging as anyone who follows us knows. We realized 30 million air segments last year that came from converted business or won new business. The challenge for us, if we had a very bullish outlook at the start of last year because we knew that was coming online. Where we were wrong is that the underlying market was quite negative and challenging. So from the start of the year, basically, you start off with DOGE and tariffs basically hitting last February and March pretty aggressively. You go through the year, a lot of recession risk. Later in the year, the government shutdown. And those things dramatically hit us. The other thing is corporate travel, which is about only between 20% and 30% of the GDS industry, but it's 45% for Sabre. Corporate travel on a unit basis was down 6% to 7% last year, 600 to 700 basis points. So while the GDS market was a bit negative last year, the impact of Sabre was much more severe. What you saw as the year -- as we went into December was that on a geographic and a line of business standpoint that normalizing, getting to 7% growth, as we articulated, as Mike said on the call, we saw that pattern persist through the first 6 weeks of the quarter. And I think what you're seeing is a much more stable backdrop. As Mike said, when you look at it geographically and you look at it by the type of customer, whether it's TMC or brick-and-mortar, OTA, basically consistent performance through all the different channels that we serve. And again, we believe the backdrop is very favorable. So as Mike said, you're going to see 3 key drivers of air distribution growth this year. One is acceleration of NDC and the reintermediation of NDC volumes that were previously direct connected by OTAs. Number two is the realization of market share gains that we continue to take. Number three is we have 50-plus new low-cost carriers in the system today versus a year ago. We launched our new LCC platform that we've talked about previously. We think that will add a couple of points of growth as well. So we think it sets up very well. And that assumes a flattish GDS market. If in fact, you go back to normalcy and you have -- and the market is 2%, 3%, 4% positive, that would be additive or accretive to the expectations we've set.
Josh Baer
AnalystsPerfect. And to clarify, when you talk about 45% corporate travel, is government and military in that bucket?
Kurt Ekert
ExecutivesNo, government military is separate from that. Government -- the U.S. military and government, if you go back to 2024, was about 4% of our air distribution bookings. Overall last year, that was down about 25% through most of the year. It was down, for example, in November, down 90%. So we've assumed that will be more stable going forward.
Josh Baer
AnalystsOkay. Great. NDC was 4%, I believe, of total air distribution bookings exiting the year. You've got over 40 live integrations with NDC. What's the assumption for NDC looking ahead? And is that coming from like a small subset of carriers, different regions? What's driving that adoption and growth?
Kurt Ekert
ExecutivesSo we've got 42 carriers now where we have live implemented NDC connections. I think that's the leading intermediary position of any aggregator in the world. Number two is we've built significant capabilities for buyers or agencies to normalize workflows between EDIFACT or NDC. Otherwise, it's very inefficient, and it's degrading from a user experience standpoint. So the solution now is sort of primed for market. The one important piece is those 42 carriers, while that's less than 10% of the carriers to whom we're connected, it accounts for nearly 80% of the total volumes we do. So it's most of the big guys now we have NDC in place. And you typically have both NDC and EDIFACT for the same carrier. I think you're going to see NDC continue to grow at a pretty rapid rate. Certain carriers do it. It's very important to them. Certain it's less strategically important. But it will -- let's say, it grew at between 50% and 100% last year in terms of its adoption. You'll see it continue to grow at that sort of rate going forward. So it will still be the minority portion of our bookings for the foreseeable future, but it's very important to the buyer or the agency, they should be relatively indifferent as to how we source that content. It doesn't matter -- it should not matter to them whether it was an EDIFACT API or an NDC API. We normalize all that on their behalf. The economics are relatively consistent. And so for them, it's about how do they run an efficient business, and we worry about that on the back end. But I think it's going to become an increasingly important part. The other thing which I mentioned earlier is in COVID and especially Sabre was late to the game on NDC, as we've talked about previously, we've now caught up and surpassed most folks, but certain OTAs direct connected to large airlines. You saw Amadeus have some level of reintermediation of those segments over the last 2 years. You're going to see us begin to do the same with OTAs as well as OTAs realize that managing direct connects is quite complex and cost inefficient and not necessarily what drives traffic and margin for them, and they realize that we can do it better. So you're going to see that as part of the growth as well.
Josh Baer
AnalystsGreat. You mentioned NDC economics are relatively similar. Were you talking about one travel buyers, suppliers? Is that for you as well? How does that impact your economics?
Michael Randolfi
ExecutivesYes. I mean the way I would think about NDC is through most of the globe, what I'd say is the incentive might be -- the booking fee might be slightly lower, the incentive slightly lower. Maybe the margin through most of the globe is flat to slightly lower. The exception is going to be in the EMEA region where average booking fees tend to be higher. But for us, that represents only 16% of our bookings. And so overall, as we look at it, we don't see significant impact on economics from NDC and actually view NDC more as an opportunity. And that's included in our guide that we provided is the expectation that NDC from where we are from the 4% we ended last year, will be growing more significantly now going forward than it has in the past.
Josh Baer
AnalystsAnd so connecting that, Mike, to revenue per booking, your average booking fee was over $6 for the year and finished the year at $6.31. How much of that increase is driven by mix versus other revenue streams when you do the calculation, think about payments? And is that level of booking fee sustainable? Or because of NDC, we should expect it to move lower?
Michael Randolfi
ExecutivesYes. So our guidance for this year for 2026 was for booking -- for air distribution bookings growth in the mid-single digits and revenue in the mid-single digits. So that kind of implies that booking fee is expected to be roughly flat year-over-year. So we do expect it to be roughly flat. So there's a combination of puts and takes. One is we have seen favorable mix trends. which do seem to be holding. NDC is slightly lower there. But then after that, certain of the products we sell, particularly hotel B2B through our GDS, that comes at a higher average booking fee and a higher average margin and then also payments. So all of that adds to our booking fee, coupled with a favorable mix. And so that's more than offsetting the impact on booking fee in NDC.
Kurt Ekert
ExecutivesYes. And 2 things just to cite within distribution, we disclosed in the last call that our land ground and CRO non-air distribution bookings, we did more than $20 billion of turnover and about $350 million of revenue last year. And then payments, we haven't broken out the revenue there, but we do $20-plus billion of turnover now on our payment solutions, and we'll likely begin to break that out from a revenue standpoint at some point this year. But those are becoming more meaningful contributors, too, to our business.
Josh Baer
AnalystsGreat. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about some IT solutions. Maybe how you think about IT solutions versus distribution. I mean distribution now is like 80% of revenue and has been growing consistently. IT solutions, 20% and has been declining in the last few years. And so what's the strategic importance of each of these businesses?
Kurt Ekert
ExecutivesBoth are very important to us, and we think both have good long-term prospects. So -- in distribution, think about it this way, which is it's a fairly mature market for air distribution. It's, one, how do you take as much share as you can? How do you grow the addressable market, which we're doing through NDC and LCC? And then how do you attach other high-value items such as hotel and payments. And so that's really what underlies the strategy there. On Airline IT, that's a very sticky business when you're in with the customer. Now Sabre until a couple of years ago was selling pretty old technology in its SabreSonic solution. That's a monolithic PSS. And as a consequence of that, we were competing against Amadeus Altéa, which was a legacy solution, but less legacy than SabreSonic. And so there was a consistent pattern pre-COVID and the early stages of COVID where we were losing head-to-head. We haven't lost a customer in 2.5 years. We're now -- what you saw in the P&L was still the effect of certain folks that have demigrated. We've built a new platform called SabreMosaic, which is a modular AI-infused sort of best-in-class platform for offer and order. We're getting tremendous feedback. We're selling the offer component of that very aggressively in the market. Not a lot of folks are going down the order route yet. That's more like an ERP. So you're displacing that. But we expect over time that, that's going to sell very well. One of the key differences here is there's not going to be a lot of PSS migrations happening in the market. We're migrating Hawaiian back to Sabre's PSS starting in Q2, but I think that's going to be an anomaly. Folks now, if they transition, are going to transition on to the newer offer and order platforms. We have more modules in production than any other technology provider in the world, including Amadeus. The other benefit is -- it's very difficult to get somebody to say, I'm going to replace my entire monolithic ERP system. But when you say you can just implement the modules you want and our system is an OPI system, it's very easy for them to pick and choose that. Now one of the key challenges we have is that our largest competitor in this space has a monopolistic position, and they behave in certain ways that we believe are anticompetitive. And so we've got to crack the code on that, which we're aiming to do. We think when we do that, we're going to unlock a significant amount of airline demand for the SabreMosaic solutions. We've indicated that, that business will grow at a mid-single-digit revenue growth this year. We think over time, that can become a high-growth part of the business, subject to unlocking that piece. And then the last thing I'll say is for both pieces, agentic AI is a significant opportunity. In the airline IT world, you've seen us go to market with, for example, Virgin Australia embed capabilities within ChatGPT, that's Sabre technology that is available to every carrier in the world now. In the distribution business, I think what we've announced, for example, with PayPal and Mindtrip is a proxy for what you're going to see us do in the market with lots of other agentic technology platforms. We think that will be a significant growth opportunity for the company.
Josh Baer
AnalystsDoes SabreMosaic make you more competitive for new -- potential new customers? Or is there also a motion to go back into your base and transition your existing customers onto the new platform?
Kurt Ekert
ExecutivesIt is very interesting. About 2.5 years ago, we made the decision that we were going to focus our development of SabreMosaic, first and foremost, on improving the relationships with our existing customers and taking them on that journey. So most of the sales and the engagement activity has been around our existing customer base. We've had pretty good success there. Now we're seeing a lot of inbound interest from non-Sabre IT customers, and the aim is to begin to grow that. But we needed a referenceable customer base in order to take this beyond the confines of Sabre, and that was really the approach.
Josh Baer
AnalystsAnd is there a financial impact when your existing customers move over from your legacy over to SabreMosaic? What's the economics?
Kurt Ekert
ExecutivesYes, the old model is largely a PB model. You're paying per booking or per passenger. It's a weird construct for a technology relationship. You're typically paying license fees or something different. We'd like to move that to more of a value-added or value sharing agreement. Some airlines are going to be wedded to the PB model. Some are going to be more open in terms of what that looks like. But on the offer side, especially, the solutions that we are building and that we have in market, which are, again, all infused with Google's Vertex and Gemini AI capabilities allow significant revenue uplift for the carriers. We'd like to be able to share in that. So we think there is the opportunity over time to improve the revenue per transaction or the revenue quality that we have with customers. The other thing is how do we sell the broader spectrum of things that they're looking for versus an all-in approach is you sell componentized technology. So we do think on both a unit basis and a volume basis, there's a revenue uplift opportunity.
Michael Randolfi
ExecutivesYes. And as we talked about on our earnings call, as you look this year, we expect revenue per quarter for Air IT to be between the range of $140 million to $150 million. And as you get to the back part of the year for a couple of reasons, we expect to see that exhibiting nice trends of growth. One is in the second quarter, we do expect the transition of a lot of the Hawaiian PBs back onto the Alaska platform, but also the sell-through of the SabreMosaic AI offer products, which is incremental to our existing product offerings will be additive to our revenue base, particularly as we get through the back part of this year. And we've actually talked about for Air IT this year, which I think is the first year since Kurt and I know it is, we expect revenue growth in the mid-single digits for Air IT this year, which is a definitive turnaround from where we've been.
Josh Baer
AnalystsExcellent. I want to spend a minute talking about gross margins and some of the various pressures on gross margin, which I think guided to 56%, 57% for this year. Any way to break out how much is NDC? How much is FX? And then going back to agentic, how much is this higher look to book?
Michael Randolfi
ExecutivesSo a couple of things. The higher look to book, first of all, any of that is going to show up in your hosting line, and that's going to show up in the technology line. As I look at what's impacted margin, there's really a few things that have impacted margin. One is we have won significant enterprise business on the agency side. That's come with significant volumes, but some of it does come with a slightly lower margin. Second, the currency impact has had a very negative impact of the dollar depreciation from an FX standpoint. And then the NDC component has actually been relatively small to date because it hasn't grown that significantly. It only ended this year at 4%, but we do expect it to grow more significantly. We don't break out the piece parts of it, but those are the contributors.
Kurt Ekert
ExecutivesI think Mike has said that we expect to be able to hold that level of gross margin going forward -- for the foreseeable future.
Michael Randolfi
ExecutivesYes.
Josh Baer
AnalystsLet's talk about the inflation offset program that you mentioned, Kurt, earlier in your opening remarks. You've got this program basically to keep technology and SG&A flat over the next 2 to 3 years. And so what are the -- like how do you accomplish that? What are the sources of savings?
Michael Randolfi
ExecutivesSure. So a couple of things. Yes, as you mentioned, our goal is to keep it roughly flat with the obviously exception of volume-related hosting costs. And so the way we think about it, first and foremost, important to support our growth strategies and our push into our AI -- our agentic AI-related products and offerings. And so with that, as I think about -- think about what's the best way to answer this.
Kurt Ekert
ExecutivesWell, there's -- the simple answer is we've said this publicly, we're doing 3 primary things. One is we're going to take advantage of best-in-class geographies from a cost standpoint. Two is we're leaning into development partnerships that we have. Three is we're dramatically leveraging AI capabilities to improve productivity and throughput of our employee base. One anecdote I will offer in doing this is there are certain places where we're reducing headcount is we've actually increased our engineering resources overall in the last year, and we're adding 400 to 500 engineers this year. You'll have more engineers a year from now than you do today for the enterprise because we have R&D relatively sacrosanct in terms of the impact of the business over time. Innovation is fundamental to our ability to grow. But we're reshaping this company for not the company we're proud of that we were, but the company we want to be going forward and making sure that we have a cost profile that enables us to invest at pace. And so the consequence is we're going to get more throughput going forward from an engineering and tech standpoint tomorrow than we did yesterday. And then we basically, as we've said, while we're holding costs constant, you'll see SG&A basically go down a bit this year, but be flattish over the next couple of years. Technology will rise slightly, but that's all on account of our expectation of volume increases. Otherwise, technology can be relatively constant. And that allows our gross profit growth to flow right down, which we think is very important given our balance sheet.
Josh Baer
AnalystsExcellent. Let's talk about free cash flow, which you've guided to negative $70 million, but that includes $60 million of restructuring costs. And so sort of putting the pieces together, your top line is growing -- should expect it to grow mid-single digits over multiple years. Your costs we just talked about are going to be relatively flat, maybe some growth around hosting, but you put those pieces together, and so we should expect free cash flow to inflect in 2027. Like what's the message, particularly to investors that are looking at across your capital structure?
Michael Randolfi
ExecutivesYes. So that's exactly right. Our expectations based on our internal growth strategy is that bookings similar to this year is likely to grow mid-single digits in 2027. With that, we'd see revenue generally growing in concert with that. As we've articulated, we're targeting to keep our technology, except for hosting costs and SG&A roughly flat. So we expect really good flow-through from gross profit to adjusted EBITDA. And then we don't have the repeat of the restructuring costs this year. And so with a growing EBITDA, we would expect to generate more free cash flow, and we would expect it to be positive next year. And then obviously, for us, that's very critical because the most important use of free cash flow for us is to ultimately delever our balance sheet. So we think this creates a really strong path to free cash flow generation in the future and further delevering on our balance sheet.
Josh Baer
AnalystsYou've accomplished a lot from a liability management perspective. Your maturities are pushed out. What's left to do? Or is there anything left to do on your near-term to-do list?
Michael Randolfi
ExecutivesYes. So thank you for the question. I think we're actually fairly well positioned right now. So if we look at how we ended the year, we had $910 million of cash on our balance sheet. Of that $910 million, $98 million is basically to pay off some debt in the first quarter as a result of the last financing. So we really have $812 million of usable cash on our balance sheet. At the same time, as you just articulated, we have a clear path to positive free cash flow generation. Our next large maturity is until June of 2029. So we think that the best focus right now for us as a company is really focus internally on our growth strategy, support our growth initiatives, focus on execution. And we think we're in a really good place right now at the moment and aren't compelled to do anything from a capital structure standpoint.
Josh Baer
AnalystsThat's great. Any questions from the audience? Do we have a mic?
Unknown Analyst
AnalystsYes, a couple of questions. First one is just around the dynamics on a potential bid for the company. Number one, are you guys going to sort of run a process now that you have this interest from Constellation other bidders. Number two, do you think antitrust prevents Travelport or [indiscernible] from getting involved here? And then number three, with respect to the capital structure, can roll over do...
Kurt Ekert
ExecutivesYes. I would -- as I said at the outset, I'm not going to comment on rumors or speculation. We're very focused on running the business. I think we articulated in the press release that we remain open to appointing Constellation to a seat on the Board, subject to reaching agreement with them. And I would just say, generally, we invite intelligent capital that makes sense for the company and for its shareholders. But that's something we'll consider only if we receive it. We're not running an active process today.
Josh Baer
AnalystsAll right. We're just about out of time. So I want to thank you, Kurt. Thank you, Mike, for the conversation. Really appreciate it.
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