On Jennifer Catto's second day at a travel startup, she flew home with her boss's ticket. It was December 2000, paper tickets still mattered, and the two had just met in New Orleans. Her boss handed over the ticket before dropping Catto at the terminal. Catto slipped it into her bag, mistaking it for her own, and boarded a flight for the holidays. The boss was left to improvise without the conveniences of a smartphone or digital check-in.
It was an awkward beginning. It also became the sort of story that improves with distance. Catto has said her boss was understanding and that they remain friends. The episode contains an early sketch of the industry she would spend much of her career reshaping: travel is a chain of handoffs, and a tiny lapse in clarity can become somebody else's urgent problem.
Catto was employee number 13 at Site59, a startup that packaged flights, hotels and cars for consumers. The company was later acquired by Travelocity. She had not arrived there through the standard marketing pipeline. At Middlebury College, where she graduated in 1998 after studying Middle Eastern geopolitics, she imagined becoming a senator and working on human-rights policy. Her early work included two years in Africa with USAID and two years at the United Nations in New York on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.
The first pivotFinding a lever that moves
The goals were important, but the pace frustrated her. Catto later explained that she did not feel able to create meaningful change quickly enough. Travel technology offered a different kind of leverage: young companies, new consumer behavior and systems still being invented. The policy career ended. The attraction to systems in transition did not.
That distinction makes her résumé easier to read. Travelocity, Condé Nast, SAY Media, Evolve Media, Tremor Video, Travelport and now Sabre can look like a sequence of industries. The more useful pattern is a sequence of inflection points. Catto tends to arrive when a company needs to say what it has become, and when that answer cannot be separated from product, operations or customer behavior.
A career built at transition points
- USAID and the United Nations - public policy and human-rights work
- Site59 / Travelocity - employee 13 enters online travel
- Condé Nast, SAY, Evolve - content, media and integrated marketing
- Telaria - a new identity for a connected-TV platform
- Travelport - modern retailing, marketing and product
- Sabre - a global marketplace needs a legible promise
At Tremor Video, Catto led the launch of Telaria, repositioning the business around premium publishers and connected television. It was more than a name change. Her remit covered public relations, product marketing, sales development, brand, design, content, events, education and research. In other words, the identity had to travel through the whole company.
“A brand is a promise you make to the market that the business has to keep.”Jennifer Catto, on joining Sabre
That sentence is Catto's compact theory of the job. A brand cannot rescue a product that breaks its word. Marketing can clarify a business, give it a memorable shape and put evidence in front of customers. The business still has to deliver.
Making software visibleSeven wonders, one proof point
Travelport gave that theory a theatrical test. The company's technology sits behind travel shopping; consumers rarely wake up eager to discuss a distribution platform. So the marketing team helped build a demonstration with a plot. British adventurer Jamie McDonald attempted to visit all seven modern wonders of the world in less than seven days. Travelport's platform and agency partner dnata handled an itinerary that made the usual round trip look like an errand.
The trip secured a Guinness World Record. The campaign reached consumer outlets and was shortlisted in the Creative B2B category at Cannes Lions in 2024. Catto's own summary emphasized three ingredients: storytelling, obsessive execution and collaboration across departments. The clever part was not merely the speed. The campaign assigned everyone the right role. McDonald was the protagonist. The agency was the expert. The platform was the machinery that made an absurdly difficult objective possible.
It is a reusable B2B lesson. When a product is complicated, do not begin by simplifying it into a vague slogan. Give it a hard, human task. Let the product perform. Make the evidence easy to repeat.
Catto's time at Travelport expanded beyond communications. By 2024 she was also serving as interim product officer, an unusually direct bridge between the promise and the machinery required to keep it. Her public writing argued that travel agencies, not chatbots, should be the beneficiaries of artificial intelligence. The valuable work happens behind the interface: sorting offers, reducing friction, helping an agent find a useful answer quickly.
The Sabre chapterLess noise, more meaning
Catto joined Sabre in February 2025 and was formally announced that May as executive vice president and chief marketing officer. Sabre is one of travel technology's established names, long associated with the global distribution system. Its current proposition is broader: a marketplace connecting airlines, hotels, agencies and other partners across retailing, distribution and fulfillment.
The branding challenge is almost architectural. Old terminology lingers after the technology changes. Customers want more content in fewer workflows. Airlines distribute offers through multiple channels. Agencies juggle portals, screens and systems that do not always speak fluently to one another. The promise must be simple without pretending the underlying world is simple.
The Catto clarity loop
In a 2025 interview about the Italian travel market, Catto put it plainly: in B2B travel, relevance matters more than reach. She described AI as a tool for reducing noise rather than amplifying it. She also argued that scale should not erase local identity. For small agencies with close customer relationships, technology should extend what they already do well rather than flatten it.
This is marketing language with an operator's test attached. Does the software eliminate a detour? Does the combined display make comparison easier? Does automation give the agent control, or merely add another box to manage? The customer meets the brand in those moments, long before an advertisement.
“We're applying AI to reduce the noise, not amplify it.”Jennifer Catto, 2025
The person behind the positioningPrepare hard, then shake it off
Catto's appetite for transition does not mean she romanticizes uncertainty. She credits an aunt with teaching her to prepare. Before Catto's first internship interview, the aunt lent her clothes, sat her in a chair and ran mock interviews again and again. Catto remembers the ordeal as torturous and invaluable. The habit followed her into presentations and boardrooms.
Preparation has a shadow: replaying the meeting after it ends. Catto has described lying awake, wondering whether she had said the right thing or sounded sufficiently informed. A senior woman in advertising gave her a small release valve: “Shake it off.” Catto says she stopped wasting energy on the loop.
The advice works because it does not excuse careless work. It separates the hours when effort helps from the hours when it merely burns. Prepare before. Pay attention during. Learn after. Then move.
Her off-duty details fit the same tension between systems and judgment. Catto is an avid traveler, has spent time mountaineering and calls herself an old-school map reader. She worries that total dependence on GPS can dull the tactile, exploratory skill of navigation. This is not nostalgia for a world without technology. It is a reminder that a tool should extend agency, not replace it.
A broader definition of workThe original mission, carried forward
The move from policy to technology did not erase Catto's earlier concerns. She has advocated for parental leave and workplace support that makes leadership more accessible to women and caregivers. At Travelport, she pointed to a company-wide policy providing all new parents at least 16 weeks of leave. Through She Runs It, she created a public-speaking series called Mic Drop to help women in technology and advertising become more confident onstage. Her professional profile also records board service with the Brooklyn Children's Museum.
There is continuity here. At the UN, the unit of change was policy. At a company, it can be a platform, a leave policy, a team practice or a story that changes where customers look. The scale differs. The instinct is recognizable.
Catto also offers advice unusual mainly because executives so often avoid saying it: take the vacation. She believes commitment and distance can coexist, and that perspective makes the work better. It is a fitting conviction for a travel executive, but it lands beyond the category. A career is not proved by never leaving the desk.
Now the assignment is Sabre. The company has modernized technical foundations and Catto's role is to make that transformation visible and credible across every customer touchpoint. The measure will not be a prettier description of complexity. It will be whether airlines, hotels and agencies feel a clearer system underneath it.
Her career began with the belief that institutions could improve lives. It changed direction when she went looking for a lever she could pull. A quarter-century later, the lever is brand, but not brand as surface. It is the discipline of matching what a company says to what its product can do - and making the promise clear enough that everyone knows when it has been kept.