Sabre Establishes ‘Travel Solutions’, Expands Tech Leadership Team

Sabre Corporation recently announced changes to its organizational structure and additions to its technology leadership, aiming to reinforce the company’s commitment to the next generation of retailing and distribution.

Dave Shirk has been promoted to executive vice president and president of Travel Solutions, a newly created organization that includes Travel Network, Airline Solutions and data and analytics solutions across the business units.

Travel Solutions represents the natural evolution of Sabre’s strategy to unify efforts across all channels of retailing, distribution and fulfillment to better serve customers, drive innovation and accelerate the development of next-generation and NDC-enabled solutions. Sabre’s reportable segments will continue to be Travel Network, Airline Solutions and Hospitality Solutions.

Dave Shirk.

Under the new structure, Wade Jones, executive vice president and president of Travel Network, will report directly to Shirk and continue executing Sabre’s Travel Network strategy.

The company also announced that Sundar Narasimhan will join Sabre as senior vice president and president of Sabre Labs and product strategy – effective July 30 and reporting to Menke. Narasimhan brings over 25 years of relevant experience, most recently serving as director of engineering at Google, where he led teams working on the company’s hospitality efforts. In his role at Sabre, Narasimhan will lead product vision and strategy, next-generation platform development and operations research. He will be based in Boston, where the company plans to open a new office to expand Sabre Labs, which explores emerging technologies and capabilities that will impact travel over the next decade.

In addition, Sabre announced the appointment of Louis Selincourt as senior vice president of global development centers, reporting to Menke. Selincourt will lead the company’s global development center operations, overseeing development operations and implementing processes that further evolve Sabre’s development capabilities, enhance product quality, and attract and retain key talent. He brings almost 40 years of relevant experience including global technology operations management at companies including Oracle, NetApp and Novell.

Joe DiFonzo continues in his role as chief information officer with responsibility for Sabre’s enterprise technology organization, corporate information technology, and risk and security functions, as well as executing the company’s shift to a cloud-first technology infrastructure.

Moreover, Vish Saoji continues to serve as CTO and focus on advancing Sabre’s technology evolution to deliver a next-generation technology platform with a fully microservice-enabled architecture.