Sabre has filed its registration for a proposed initial public offering (IPO) with the Securities and Exchange Commission in the US.
The company says the number of shares to be sold in the business and the price range for the floatation have yet to be determined.
The return to the public markets comes some six and a half years after it went private following its acquisition by Silver Lake and TPG Partners for $5 billion.
It listed originally in 2000 after being spun off from American Airlines.
Sabre has named Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs & Co, Bank of Amercia Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank Securities as "book-runners" for the IPO.
The decision to put the company on the public markets has been widely rumoured for a number of years, so the filing today with the SEC will not come as a particularly huge surprise to its 10,000 employees and the wider industry.
Former-CEO Sam Gilliland spoke of his desire to file for an IPO over two years ago, but significant structural changes in the past six months have inevitably seen the rumour-mill go into over time.
The most significant move came in August this year when Gilliland stepped down to be replaced by president and Tom Klein, in what was labelled a "carefully orchestrated succession process".
Just a week after the Klein's promotion, Sabre announced a plan to have Expedia power its long-held consumer-facing business Travelocity in the US and Canada.
By the end of last year the majority of Travelocity's online hotel and air offering had already been migrated to the Expedia platform, and a launch of the majority of the remainder is expected in early 2014.
This perceived trimming of the costs associated with running its online travel agency (which came just two months after offloading the Travelocity for Business division to BDC Travel) continued to see many assume Sabre was positioning itself for a floatation.
Sabre says for the full year ending December 2012 it recorded revenue of $3.0 billion and achieved gross margin of $1.4 billion.
For the nine months ending September last year, Sabre Travel Network contributed 57%, Airline and Hospitality Solutions some 22%, and Travelocity pumped in 21% of overall revenues to the group.
The company, according to Moody's, has some $3.9 billion in senior secured and senior unsecured debt.
How analysts will react to the IPO is unclear at this stage, although Sundeep Chanana, an analyst from Waller Capital, said in the summer:
"Sabre is the only travel technology provider in the US that’s positioned to capitalize on the convergence of marketing and distribution as well as the airline shift away from GDSs and towards CRS bookings.
"The saving grace is there’s quite literally no one else in the US market that has this comprehensive offering of products and services."
Sabre's decision to file for an IPO comes almost four years to the day since both its rivals, Travelport and Amadeus, started their own plans to list on the public markets in the UK and Spain respectively.
Amadeus made it out of the blocks in April of the same year, but Travelport pulled its IPO just weeks after starting its investor roadshows, later citing unfavourable market conditions.