There is a particular kind of frustration that comes from being told the future is here when everything about your working reality says it is not.
That is where the African travel agent stands today.
Across Nairobi, Lagos, Accra, Johannesburg, Kigali, and Dar es Salaam, thousands of travel agencies are running their businesses on the same infrastructure they used a decade ago: a GDS terminal, a BSP account, and a mental model built around EDIFACT. The system works. It has always worked. And that, more than anything else, is the problem.
Because while the rest of the world argues about the pace of NDC adoption, Africa is still in the waiting room. Not by choice, but by design.
The GDS Was Never Neutral
To understand what NDC means for the African travel agent, you first have to be honest about what the GDS actually is.
The Global Distribution System was not built for Africa. It was built for markets with large corporate travel programmes, high volumes of leisure transatlantic traffic, and agency ecosystems capable of generating the minimum booking volumes that made GDS economics viable. Africa was brought in largely as an afterthought: a distribution channel for the continent’s handful of flag carriers and the international airlines that serve it.
The traditional GDS approach involves a complex and time-consuming booking process, and many online booking tools and corporate travel companies have simply waited for GDSs to build NDC connections rather than investing outside the system. For agents in mature markets, this passivity has a cost but not an existential one. For agents in Africa, it compounds a deeper structural problem: the GDS relationship was never truly reciprocal.
African agents pay booking fees that flow to Amadeus, Sabre, and Travelport. The African agent gets a terminal, a training manual, and access to inventory. What they do not get is a roadmap for what happens when that inventory starts migrating to channels the GDS does not fully control.
What NDC Actually Promises and Why It Matters Here
NDC is often described as a technical standard. That framing undersells it and obscures what is genuinely at stake.
At its core, NDC is a power transfer. The original motivation was to address the limitations of the indirect booking flow, in which GDSs were responsible for building offers from various pieces of flight content: availability from an airline’s Computer Reservation System, rates from fare repositories, and schedules from third-party databases. Under that model, the airline was essentially blind to its own customer until the transaction was complete. NDC was designed to change that.
For airlines, it means the ability to offer dynamic pricing, rich ancillary content including seat maps, meal preferences, and baggage bundles, plus personalised offers calibrated to who is actually buying the ticket. For agents, it theoretically means access to content the GDS cannot replicate: exclusive fares, bundled products, early inventory access.
Airlines are increasingly reserving certain offers, including discounted fares and premium packages, exclusively for NDC channels, giving agents who adopt it a genuine competitive edge.
This is not theoretical anymore. Kenya Airways launched NDC with Verteil Technologies as its first aggregator, and the commercial logic is explicit: KQ implemented a GDS surcharge of USD 5 for local domestic and USD 8 for international bookings per segment per passenger, with no such surcharge on the NDC channel, plus better and earlier access to more competitive airline content.
That is not an incentive programme. That is a structural repricing of the indirect channel. And the agents who are not paying attention will feel it in their margins before they fully understand what happened.
South Africa Is Not the Whole Continent
Here is where the African narrative gets distorted.
When industry analysts discuss NDC progress in Africa, they typically reach for South Africa as a reference point. South Africa has the continent’s most sophisticated corporate travel infrastructure, the highest density of BSP-accredited agencies, and the deepest GDS penetration. It also has the most NDC-ready agency ecosystem on the continent. But South Africa is not Africa.
In markets such as India and the Maldives, NDC penetration rates are already reaching above 80 to 90 percent, and South Africa is not far behind. That trajectory makes headlines. But for every South African TMC quietly upgrading its tech stack, there are hundreds of agents in francophone West Africa, East Africa, and Central Africa who have never heard of Verteil, have no relationship with an NDC aggregator, and whose GDS contract explicitly shapes what content they can and cannot access.
The gap between the NDC frontier and the NDC reality on this continent is enormous. And it is not narrowing fast enough.
The Servicing Problem Nobody Wants to Solve
Even where NDC content is available, the adoption story in Africa runs into a wall that is rarely acknowledged in international coverage of this issue.
Booking a flight through NDC is one thing. Servicing it is another.
Booking servicing, especially post-sale changes, refunds, and special requests, has emerged as the single biggest pain point for agents. With no standard servicing logic across airlines, agents are often left to navigate a patchwork of support systems, rules, and error-prone manual processes, significantly increasing operational costs.
In markets like the UK or Germany, this is an inconvenience. Agencies have back-office systems, dedicated NDC support teams, and technical resources to absorb the friction. In Nairobi or Abidjan, a mid-size travel agency might be running on three staff members, a single GDS terminal, and a WhatsApp group for client communication. The idea that this agency can simultaneously manage GDS workflows, NDC API integrations, and divergent servicing processes across multiple airline implementations is not a transition plan. It is a fantasy.
The cost and complexity of developing compliant technology and back-office processes, combined with limited post-sale servicing capabilities, have long been the concerns that won out for agencies even as airlines offered more compelling products via NDC. In Africa, those concerns are amplified by a factor of infrastructure reality.
The Aggregator Question
The most credible answer to all of this is the NDC aggregator.
Aggregators like Verteil, AirGateway, TPConnects, and others occupy a critical middle position in the new distribution architecture. Rather than requiring every agency to build a direct NDC connection with every airline, a technically and commercially prohibitive undertaking, aggregators sit between the airline and the agent, normalising content, handling the API complexity, and presenting bookable inventory in a format that integrates with existing workflows.
While integration to a GDS can take months, with multiple stages of negotiation, contracts, technical integration, certification, and staff training, with an aggregator this process is significantly shortened, with some able to train clients to work with NDC content in less than two weeks.
Kenya Airways made this bet explicitly. The airline went live on NDC via Verteil, and the FAQ it published to its agency network is unusually candid about why: since the aggregator is already connected to the airline, the agent has a quicker and easier means of getting onboard with NDC, and can check with the aggregator first for any technical issues before escalating to the airline NDC helpdesk.
This model works. But it depends entirely on aggregators choosing to build distribution coverage for African markets, and on African airlines having the PSS capability and commercial will to activate NDC in the first place. Both of those conditions are still developing.
The BSP Trap
There is one structural constraint that receives almost no airtime in NDC discussions but sits at the heart of the African agency problem: the BSP.
The Billing and Settlement Plan is the financial settlement infrastructure that sits beneath GDS-based ticketing. It is how agents collect payment from clients, remit to airlines, and manage their financial exposure. It is also, in most African markets, the only credible settlement infrastructure available to travel agencies.
With NDC, the airline becomes the merchant processing payment. This is a fundamental shift from the BSP model, where the BSP is responsible for cash collection from agents, payment of commissions, and preparation of card remittance files for the ticketing airline.
For a well-capitalised European TMC with treasury operations and multi-currency card processing, this transition is a project. For an African agency operating on thin credit lines, dependent on BSP settlement cycles to manage cash flow, and without access to the payment infrastructure that NDC direct billing assumes, it is an existential question.
Nobody building NDC products in Dublin or Singapore or Dallas is losing sleep over this problem. But it is the central financial reality of the African travel agency in 2026.
The Airlines Are Not Off the Hook Either
It would be convenient, and wrong, to frame this entirely as an agent readiness problem. African airlines carry their own share of this burden.
A major revelation from recent industry discussions is the failure of NDC to fulfil its original goal as a universal standard. Instead of one integration model, each airline has developed its own customised implementation of NDC, effectively undoing the benefits of simplification.
For African agents trying to maintain multi-airline NDC relationships, Ethiopian Airlines, Kenya Airways, RwandAir, EgyptAir, and South African Airways each have different NDC maturity levels, different aggregator partnerships, different surcharge structures, and different servicing capabilities. The agent trying to serve a corporate travel programme with routes across three African carriers is not choosing between a GDS and NDC. They are being asked to manage a fragmented, multi-implementation ecosystem that has not been designed with their operational reality in mind.
What Has to Change
The structural case for NDC adoption in Africa is sound. Dynamic pricing, ancillary access, richer content, lower distribution costs. These are genuine benefits, not marketing claims. But the pathway from here to there requires honesty about what is actually blocking progress, and from whom.
African airlines need to invest in NDC readiness not just as a distribution project, but as a trade enablement strategy. That means building proper agency onboarding programmes, maintaining content parity between channels during the transition period, and committing to servicing standards that agents can rely on operationally.
GDSs need to stop treating their African presence as a legacy revenue line to be milked before NDC arrives. The opportunity to build hybrid infrastructure, combining GDS and NDC content in a single workflow, is real. The agencies that will survive this transition are the ones whose technology partners help them access both.
Aggregators need to build explicit African go-to-market strategies, not assume that global connectivity solves a local adoption problem. Localised training, vernacular-language support, integration with African BSP realities, and pricing models that match African agency economics are not nice-to-haves. They are the conditions of relevance.
And African travel agencies need to stop waiting for the transition to arrive and start treating it as an operational planning problem. The surcharges are already live. The content divergence is already happening. NDC is no longer just an innovation. In 2025 and into 2026, it is a commercial necessity, and agents who fail to engage with it risk being locked out of the very content their clients are willing to pay for.
The Verdict
The African travel agent in 2026 is not naive about what is coming. They are, in many cases, simply under-resourced to meet it, and under-served by an industry that has designed its transformation roadmap for markets with more capital, more infrastructure, and more political weight in the rooms where these decisions get made.
That is not a reason for fatalism. Africa has a history of leapfrogging infrastructure cycles. Mobile money is the most cited and still the most instructive example. The distribution transformation happening in global travel is another such moment. The question is whether the players building NDC’s next chapter are paying enough attention to make sure this continent does not spend another decade watching from the edge of a revolution it had every reason to lead.
The agents are ready to move. The infrastructure just has to meet them.
Travel Distribution News covers airline distribution, NDC, GDS dynamics, travel payments, and emerging market technology.
This article represents the editorial view of TDN.
