Travelport's return to public markets last September means that for the first time in over ten years it is possible to compare it alongside Sabre and Amadeus, financially and operationally.
Over the past few weeks, all three have each reported full year results for 2014.
That was then
The last time all three were listed on the markets at the same time was in 2004, when the world was a very different place - no Twitter, no iPhone, no post-Lehmans global financial catastrophe, no Tnooz.
The GDSs were different too - maybe the biggest change is the fact they are now exclusively B2B - the glamorous ownership of consumer-facing sites proved too precarious - Travelport's Orbitz Worldwide, Sabre's Travelocity and lastminute.com and Amadeus' Opodo and Rumbo have all been and gone.
All three however remain active in the consumer world, working with the OTAs behind the scenes.
This is now
Meaningful financial comparisons are skewed by Amadeus being listed in Madrid and reporting in euros while Travelport and Sabre are dollar-based and in New York. Definitions of financial metrics might also differ between the two jurisdictions. And even in New York, Sabre talks in totals while Travelport prefers net.
Here's how the revenues, EBITDAs and margins stack up.
So can we say that Amadeus is the most profitable of the three on an EBITDA basis and by some clear distance? Maybe I'll leave that to a financial analyst to say for sure.
"We're technology partners, not a GDS"
Operational comparisons probably stand up to closer scrutiny as all three talk about bookings and/or segments. Starting with the GDS business - Sabre's Travel Network unit; Amadeus Distribution business line and Travelport's Travel Commerce Platform (which at 95% of its entire business is almost the entire business).
The difference between Sabre's bookings and Travelport's segments isn't that great - what's 10 million between friends - but again both are short of Amadeus.
But with air accounting for nearly 90% of its travel agency bookings Amadeus does seem overly-reliant on air.
Travelport meanwhile talks about "attachment rates" and reports that in last three months of 2014 it booked 46 hospitality segments for every 100 air bookings. Hospitality is non-air (or "beyond air" in Travelport-speak) and covers hotels, cars, rail and others. This attachment rate number suggests that Travelport has a wider product reach with travel agents.
Solutions in the air
Sabre and Amadeus both have an airline and hospitality IT unit which is reported separately from their distribution activities, with SabreSonic and Altea the jewels in their airline IT crowns (although their hotel IT offers are twinkling in the distance).
Their competitors for the airline IT slice of the travel tech market is not Travelport but businesses such as Navitaire, SITA and HP.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, Amadeus is ahead here too. In 2014, Sabre Airline IT claimed 510.7m passengers boarded, compared with Amadeus' 695.4m.
Moving ahead, Amadeus ambitiously states that by 2017 Altea will handle one billion passengers as airlines such as Thomas Cook (c.17m) and Japan Airlines (40m) come onto the platform.
But the biggest boost for Altea will be Southwest's domestic operations, not only because of the 120 million passengers a year it will add but also the importance to Amadeus of getting a big presence in the US, at last.
Conversely, this ramping up of Altea reinforces Amadeus' airline-centric approach.
Sabre doesn't give a 2017 projection, but says that in 2014 it "won" American Airlines, airberlin, Alitalia, Copa, so its numbers are also set to rise.
For reference, SITA's Horizon handles 125 million passengers a year.
Solutions in the room
Details about the success or otherwise of Sabre and Amadeus' hospitality units are less clear, although this might be an area where Sabre has the edge over Amadeus. It has signed up Wyndham Hotels to its SnyXis platform. Wyndhams is the world's largest hotel chain with more than 7500 hotels under various brands, and 4,500 North American properties will come onto SnyXis this year.
Sabre has also launched a new product called InstaSite, which gives hotels a quick and easy cloud-based web site and associated services.
Sabre has been growing its hotel IT business for the past fifteen years, basing it around the SynXis platform and launched its dedicated hospitality solutions unit in 2010. Amadeus on the other hand bought into the market, spending $500m on Newmarket International late 2013 to kickstart its push into hotels.
However, this pales into insignificance compared with the $5.3 billion dollars paid by Oracle for Micros less than a year ago.
And let's not overlook Travelport's move into hotel IT with its purchase of Hotelzon for an undisclosed amount, likely to be in the double-digit-million-dollar range.
Solutions elsewhere
Amadeus also has bought itself a foothold in the airport IT sector, buying UFIS early in 2014. Undisclosed at the time, it emerged in its FYs that that it paid 18.8 million euros for the business.
It also a big in-house and Europe-focused rail IT unit. Both these verticals are areas where neither Travelport or Sabre appears to have any great scale or ambition.
Travelport however has a 73% stake in payments businesss eNett, which lifted revenues by 49% in 2014 and which has been identified internally and by analysts as an important part of the business.
The world is not enough
The regional breakdowns provided by Travelport and Amadeus are also worth noting. Europe accounts for more than half of the 466.5m travel agent air bookings made by Amadeus in 2014: western Europe accounts for 41.3% with central southern and eastern Europe adding a further 9.8%
Travelport meanwhile breaks down its "356m reported segments" by region, 158m of which comes from the US with 198 million from international. Percentagewise we're looking at: North America 44%, Europe 24%, APAC 16%, MEA 11% and LAtAm & Canada 4%.
So it does look as if Travelport is less reliant on its home market of North America than Amadeus is on its European roots.
Sabre is less forthcoming, again, in terms of a regional breakdown. But it does say that its EMEA bookings at Sabre Travel Network grew by 9.8% in 2014.
So what's next?
In terms of the distribution piece, the one thing we do know is that Sabre told the markets in January about a "proposed acquisition" for its Travel Network segment which would cost around $500 million.
Analysts suggested that this was likely to be a move to take full control of Abacus, a GDS for Asia-Pacific of which Sabre currently owns 35%.
Other than that, the distribution side seems quite settled with no obvious areas for significant change to come.
Perhaps the IT solutions side is where the big guns will be rolled out, particularly in hospitality which is still quite fragmented on a global perspective and where there are business out there which are potential takeover targets.
Amadeus is also on the look-out for deals. When asked by analysts, it's CEO Luis Maroto admitted the business was interested in M&A but that it was "difficult" to reach agreement. No bidding wars, then.
Does size matter?
Market capitalization is often seen as a bellweather for success - the idea being that investors are all-seeing all-powerful beings who know better than everyone else how good a business is - and the bigger the market cap, the better the business. Again, financial analysts can discuss the merits of this elsewhere, but from a travel tech perspective, no way is Amadeus ten times better than Travelport.
Although does that relatively low market cap make Travelport a takeover target?
The table below compares the market caps of the three, today (10 march 2015).
To conclude
Amadeus does appear to have more EBITDA, more pax boarded by Altea, more agency bookings. Sabre is holding its own in distribution and could benefit from the momentum of early adopter status when it comes to hotel IT. Travelport's distribution business ticks over quite nicely and has eNett waiting in the wings.
I started this piece by suggesting that there would be a winner, and I'm not sure whether there is. Maybe it's the taking part that counts.
Background:
Here are the links to the 2014 FY presentations:
TravelportSabreAmadeus
Here's link to the Tnooz coverage
Travelport growth to come from non-air, possibly a third of revenue within three years
Sabre posts earning gains for 2014, right on track
Amadeus closes year on a high, scoping further acquisitions if price right
And for the hardcore GDS geeks, here's links to the 2004 FYs...
Travelport (reported as part of Cendant)
SabreAmadeus
NB Robot image by Shutterstock